Do furniture designers use COSMOS (Solidworks)

Special Interest Areas furniture
1

HI:

I am about to buy a student edition of Solidworks and wanted to know if it was worth it to get COSMOS since I am primarily going to be using it for furniture design.

Any input would be helpful from furniture designers who use Solidworks with or without COSMOS. I know that one version of hte student edition comes with cosmos express, but I wanted to know is COSMOS was worth getting.

Thanks!

2

COSMOS is an FEA analysis add-in that allows you to pre-test stresses on models. If you are designing a plastic seat and want to test to see if it will break then it’s a great tool. It’s used extensively in some industries (plastics), but not so much in others (wood furniture).

3

I am actually an ME grad that got a masters in ID later on, so I was thinking of getting it anyway. The price difference is pretty small comparatively.

So, I think I’ll go ahead and get it. Did you ever try SolidProfessor? I am thinking not too many people had to worry about that since they were taking classes at university, etc.

4

While I haven’t used SW Cosmos for furniture design as I work primary in cosumer and industrial segments I think CosmosExpress would be sufficient.

Cosmos is a powerful program and if you don’t have proper training to use it, your design could be adversely affected. In my experience, the small FEA built in SW (CosmosExpress) should be fine. There is a decent mat. library that you can customize and add too. Also, you have some control over mesh size althouhg you can directly specifiy your max. polygon size (nor see it) but use a slider to refine it. If you need more power, say working on a task chair you should have a engineer working on it with you or at least consult with one.

J

5

I am also an engineer who moved to furniture design. I have used Cosmos (CosmosExpress actually) exactly once on furniture over the last 3 years or so.

6

Thanks for all of your input! I’ll think I’ll just stick with cosmos xpress for now…