Goal Seeking in Solid Edge

This comment from Dan Lanigan reminded me of something that I had promised myself to do but never actually got down to doing it – learn more about the Goal Seek feature of Solid Edge. So this morning I fired up Solid Edge ST2 and searched the product documentation for a tutorial on Goal Seek. I found one and carried out the simple steps to complete it.

Since the interest in Goal Seek emanated from my article on GrafiCalc, a software whose main purpose is goal seeking, I decided to try out the two circle problem I mentioned in that article. The problem is as follows:

“Given two intersecting circles A and B, what is the radius of circle A so that the area of intersection of the two circles is equal to half the area of circle B?”

I sketched two circles and dimensioned them as necessary.

As you can see in the figure above, the area of the circle on the right (Right Area) is 314.16. I now needed to calculate the radius (R1) of the left circle so that the area of intersection of the two circles (Middle Area) equals half of Right Area. This video shows how the Goal Seek feature of Solid Edge did it for me in a jiffy.

One small problem is that Solid Edge did not allow me to enter an expression for the target value. I needed to enter numbers only. It would have been nice to enter 0.5 times Right Area or pick a value from the graphics window, instead of entering 157.08. But that’s not a big deal. The point is that Solid Edge found a solution for me almost instantly.

If you are interested you can download a white paper written by Siemens PLM called “Goal Seeking in Solid Edge“.