The Vent feature in SOLIDWORKS is a great way to add any sort of vents for airflow through sheet metal and plastic parts. It’s a very simple way to create a vent opening, spars and ribs as needed.
Today, we will be looking at how to easily automate this based on a sketch in SOLDIWORKS.
Create a base flange, sketch up the desired drawings on the surface of the base flange as shown above.
- First, you’ll want to sketch some 2D profiles to see what you want the vent to look like.
- This could really be any shape, but here, we will draw a rectangle with some strengthening ribs and spars.
- The vent feature isn’t just limited to linear geometry either. You can create spars and ribs that are lines, arcs or even splines, so really any geometry that you’re looking for with your vent feature is achievable.
- To obtain vent feature we need to go to sheet metal> vent
- Select the vent option ,Select the boundary option and select the boundary to be retained as shown in the figure
- Now select the ribs option, basically ribs form the strengthening form to the spars . Select the ribs which are in the form of splines, here we can determine the distance of the spars depending upon requirements.
- Now we will select all the spars which are in the form of circle , do select all the spars and assign the distances
- In this final step we determine the fill in the boundary condition for the center most part of our model as shown in the figure.
- The final model looks like the above figure by using vent command.
