How do you know if your simulation is accurate? The process of validation and verification is one of most critical processes needed for a simulation study. For any process, careful steps will have to be taken to make sure the process is valid and needs to be verified that the process is showing what it is designed to show. The same idea exists with a simulation package on a computer.
Typical results show that a simulation is only valid for certain domains or regimes and must be verified that the model can be valid over those domain and regimes. This is so important, the US military has codified VV&A (Validation, Verification and Accreditation) to a Military Standard MIL-STD-3022.
Definition of the activity are as follows:
- Verification is the process of determining that a model or simulation implementation accurately represents the developer’s conceptual description and specifications.
- Validation is the process of determining the degree to which the model or simulation is an accurate representation of the real world from the perspective of the intended uses.
- Accreditation is an official determination that a model or simulation is acceptable to use for a specific purpose.
As a process, VV&A can be applied to any simulation that is ran, but how you verify and validate SOLIDWORKS Simulation itself?
To answer this, every version of SOLIDWORKS Simulation has this in mind when a new version comes out with new features. Inside the technical documentation that is installed with every installation of SOLIDWORKS Simulation there is a section under Help, SOLIDWORKS Simulation, Validation there are a group of validation problems and benchmarks that are used to validate the software.
On the right hand side of the software, a separate window will pop up and one can access the problems and benchmarks. The problems and benchmarks are already setup and are ready to be solved to verify the validity of SOLIDWORKS Simulation. The problems and benchmarks have known analytical answers that can be compared to the simulated results and SOLIDWORKS also uses published benchmarks from NAFEMS to validate SOLIDWORKS Simulation in addition to the verification problems. NAFEMS is the International Association for the Engineering Modelling, Analysis and Simulation Community and has been a not-for-profit organization since 1983.
The problems are broken up into sections such as Static, Thermal, Frequency, Nonlinear and as long as a valid simulation license is available for the particular solver that is used the simulation can be run.
While the main purpose of the benchmarks is to verify and validate SOLIDWORKS Simulation, but they can also serve another purpose as a case study for user to see how certain tools like contact or composites are to be setup and used.
If you have any questions about the benchmarks for SOLIDWORKS Simulation or if there are additional questions, please reach out to your TriMech representative.
