Alright, so you have selected a bunch of faces for applying a load. Now you want to pick those same faces to apply a mesh control to them to make sure that you have accurate results. As you may already now a smaller element size in a region improves the accuracy of results in that region. It’s just a pain to re-select all those faces, right? Not really. I found this trick recently to help re-use that selection set.
For this example in the video below, select the faces that you want to restrain or add loads to in the normal way. It sometimes helps to select in wireframe mode and use a SolidWorks selection filter to grab all the faces of the model quickly. Use the “X” key to select “faces” quickly. Then apply the load or restraint as usual. Once that occurs and you set up the rest of the model, the selection set is then available for re-use. For example, to add a mesh control to reduce the element size on the selections for loads and restrains, simply pre-select the aforementioned load or restraint, rich click on the mesh icon in the Simulation Study Manager and choose Mesh Control. You will then notice that the faces are all selected as you would have hoped. I have not tried this in SolidWorks 2009, but it definitely works in SolidWorks 2010. This also has worked for quite some time in SolidWorks Flow Simulation.
