In this age of data, it is not uncommon to encounter data loss or data corruption. This also applies to Material databases in simulation tools. SOLIDWORKS Flow Simulation uses computational fluid dynamics to enable efficient and accurate simulation of fluid flow and heat transfers. SOLIDWORKS Flow Simulations users might have experienced the issue of missing materials in the engineering database or inability to add new materials to the engineering database.
In some cases, a database only allows you to select liquids or gases and doesn’t allow addition of other fluids such as non-Newtonian liquids to your flow project. All of these are indications of SOLIDWORKS Flow Simulation engineering database corruption.
While we are used to creating multiple back-ups to avoid data loss, data restoration is time consuming, and we need an efficient way to get back the lost data. When a Flow Simulation engineering database goes corrupt, the easiest way to restore is to copy the backed-up Flow Simulation engineering database – ChemBase.xml (or user defined database ChemBaseUser2.xml) from another machine which has a valid copy of material database.
The ChemBaseUser2.xml file is located by default in one of these folders, depending on the version of SOLIDWORKS and of the operating system:
\Users\[WINDOWS_LOGIN]\AppData\Roaming\COSMOSApplications\FlowSimulation20XX\ ExternalDBCache\DocumentsandSettings\AllUsers\ApplicationData\Simulation\Flow Simulation 20XX\ProgramData\COSMOS Applications\Flow Simulation 20XX
To use another ChemBaseUser2.xml file, click Tools > Flow Simulation > Tools > Options and under the ‘User-defined database location’ item specify the file location.
Another option is to repair the installation of SOLIDWORKS & Flow Simulation.
In situations when repairing installation or reinstalling the software does not resolve the problem, the issue could be related to the license. This is especially true if there was a previous installation of temporary-evaluation version of SOLIDWORKS Flow Simulation license.
To fix the problem on network installation, unload SOLIDWORKS Flow Simulation from Add-Ins on the client machine and exit out of SOLIDWORKS to return all active SOLIDWORKS licenses. Thereafter, reactivate SOLIDWORKS SolidNetwork license manager on the server. On a client machine, check the License Order tab in SOLIDWORKS license manager client to ensure SOLIDWORKS Flow Simulation is listed at the top. Restart SOLIDWORKS on the client machine and reload the Flow Simulation Add-In. Next, create a SOLIDWORKS Flow Simulation project to check if the problem is resolved and all fluids are correctly showing as expected.
To fix the same problem for standalone installations, try reactivation of SOLIDWORKS Flow Simulation after unloading and reloading SOLIDWORKS Flow Simulation from Tools Add-Ins. Also ensure that the Flow Simulation license in SOLIDWORKS Help->Show License is not listed as SOLIDWORKS Flow Simulation Standard (internal license feature name ‘cae_cosmosfloworksstd’).
Note that users can share the user-defined data file (ChemBaseUser2.xml ) if their User-defined database location points to the same network location. There is no limitation for the number of users who can simultaneously use the ChemBaseUser2.xml but if a user is saving the database, the other users will have to wait until the saving is complete. As all users are authorized to modify the database, this can make the database difficult to manage. The database may end up containing many duplicate entities.
If the above mentioned steps do not help please contact us.
