Coming later this year to the Solidworks portfolio will be Exalead Onepart, software for searching corporate databases by part attribute or shape. The initial installation will be time consuming and pricey  but worth it not only for finding parts but for weeding out duplicate parts in inventory. No word yet on price or maintenance cost.

Pat Hunt does not find the new data surprising. She’s a reproductive biologist at Washington State University in Pullman who has studied plastic leaching. Heat can cause chemicals to migrate out of plastics, she explains. Hot water in a dishwasher helps to clean and sanitize dishes. But plastics that are repeatedly exposed to high heat can start to break down. “Plastics just shouldn’t go in the dishwasher,” she concludes.

chemical: A substance formed from two or more atoms that unite (bond) in a fixed proportion and structure. For example, water is a chemical made when two hydrogen atoms bond to one oxygen atom. Its chemical formula is H2O. Chemical also can be an adjective to describe properties of materials that are the result of various reactions between different compounds.

For years automotive and aeronautics engineers have discussed (and begun to implement) MBD, a sea change in which all engineering data is delivered to manufacturing people (or to customers) not as stacks of 2D drawings and accompanying model files but as 3D model files with product manufacturing information (PMI) attached. A few small vendors (including Anark and Lattice 3D) have made a living making software to support MBD for companies such as Boeing and Ford.

In 2005 Solidworks surveyed its user base and found 1.5% of them wanted to use MBD. A similar survey last year found 16% wanting to use MBD in Solidworks. The product will be sold separately from the regular Solidworks packages. The initial license fee is $1,995 plus an annual $495 subscription for support and future upgrades. Those 16% of users will provide more than enough early adopters to justify the development.

In the late 1990s, she found that a hormone-mimicking chemical — BPA — had leached out of the plastic cages and water bottles that she used for the mice in her lab. She had cleaned and sanitized the equipment in a dishwasher. Afterward, BPA (a building block of polycarbonate plastic) tainted the animals’ food and drinking water. Mice exposed to this chemical later had trouble getting pregnant.

plastic: Any of a series of materials that are easily deformable; or synthetic materials that have been made from polymers (long strings of some building-block molecule) that tend to be lightweight, inexpensive and resistant to degradation. (adj.) A material that is able to adapt by changing shape or possibly even changing its function.

Tisler and Christensen’s study turned up no sign of BPA in the water stored in sports bottles. But some of the chemicals they did detect — including some plasticizers and compounds used to color bottles — may similarly disrupt hormones.

Plastic sports bottles shed hundreds of chemicals into the water they hold, a new study finds. The containers release even more pollutants after being run through a dishwasher. Although some of the chemicals might be harmful, it’s not yet known whether there’s any health risk from the amounts that end up in the water.

Previews of new software for the Solidworks portfolio based on what Dassault now calls the “3D Experience” platform only made the cloud seem more ominous. Dassault’s 3D Experience platform includes a common interface program with technology that allows companies to create shared information systems around a project. The 3D Experience tool will help tie together Dassault’s CAD and PLM products including Catia, Simulia, Enovia, Delmia, and Solidworks. The 3D Experience Platform app provides access to content created in Dassault’s products and also information related to a project via a common interface.

Solidworks is the first mainstream CAD company to respond, introducing Solidworks MBD as a new product in the 2015 portfolio. The product enables Solidworks users to fully implement ANSI standard Y14.41, which specifies how 3D annotations should be attached as named views to 3D models. To our knowledge, no other mid-priced CAD vendor has accomplished this.

Hunt agrees. “This study represents a starting point,” she says. It gives researchers clues about what chemicals may be present in water from reusable bottles. But it doesn’t reveal what risks the now-polluted water may pose. Indeed, very little is known about many of the chemicals that were detected in the study. More research is needed to learn what these chemicals may do in the body, says Hunt.

agent: A person or thing (it can be a chemical or even a form of energy) that plays some role in getting something done.

A few years ago Solidworks introduced a costing module, which was an instant hit among users. This year Solidworks introduces Inspection, another plug-in and standalone application to automate the tedious process of creating inspection sheets. The entry-level version costs $1,995 plus $599 for the annual subscription. For an extra $1,500 (and $1,049 maintenance), there is a premium version that enables users to enter measurements and collect inspection values from CMM software.

Still, Kannan says, lowering exposures to plastic-related chemicals is probably a good idea. He recommends using glass or stainless steel water bottles over plastic when possible.

Scientists had known for years that chemicals can leach out of plastic. Some of those chemicals can be toxic. Manufacturers have removed some of the more worrisome chemicals, such as bisphenol A (BPA), from plastic products, such as water bottles. But little is known about what other chemicals might leave these products.

bisphenol A (BPA): A building block of polycarbonate plastics and many commercially important resins. This chemical gained widespread public attention when research showed it could mimic the activity of estrogen, a female sex hormone.

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Solidworks is now rolling out its 2015 portfolio, and while there is truly interesting news to report about Solidworks and several of its add-ons, the real news is a weather report: the dark cloud is gone. “Solidworks is not going away,” said division CEO Bertrand Sicot, specifically in reference to the core CAD product. He said it could easily be around in its current form another 10 to 15 years. This year’s updates prove the company is serious about keeping its flagship software fresh and vital.

risk: The chance or mathematical likelihood that some bad thing might happen. For instance, exposure to radiation poses a risk of cancer. Or the hazard — or peril — itself. (For instance: Among cancer risks that the people faced were radiation and drinking water tainted with arsenic.)

When 3D CAD started to take off in mechanical engineering, it was a tool for design. When a design was complete, the data was passed along to others for QA/inspection, costing, simulation and analysis, tooling, and documentation; there was considerable rework in 2D. With each annual release of the Solidworks portfolio, the company has provided more tools to keep the larger engineering/manufacturing process inside Solidworks longer.

Two chemists at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark have now used those new analytical tools to study water from sports bottles. Selina Tisler and Jan Christensen now report that these reusable water bottles released hundreds of plastic-related chemicals into the water they held — chemicals that hadn’t been in the starting water. The team describes its findings in the May 5 Journal of Hazardous Materials.

Christensen, a soccer coach, noticed that players on his team regularly drank water from reusable plastic sports bottles. Sometimes the players complained their water smelled or tasted a bit like plastic. This was usually after the water had been sitting in the bottles for hours. Christensen decided to see if he could figure out why.

molecule: An electrically neutral group of atoms that represents the smallest possible amount of a chemical compound. Molecules can be made of single types of atoms or of different types. For example, the oxygen in the air is made of two oxygen atoms (O2), but water is made of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom (H2O).

Since 2010, a dark cloud of questions has been hanging over the Solidworks division of Dassault Systemés regarding the future of the company’s eponymous, market-leading 3D CAD software. Several “look but don’t touch” demos of “possible future software” and statements about the next generation of Solidworks switching to the same geometry technology as Catia, which is not perfectly compatible with the Solidworks core geometry, kept customers and resellers muttering about the future.

What’s more, until recently, scientists lacked the tools to detect many of the compounds that plastics may shed. New tools now make it possible to detect some of these unknown pollutants, says Kurunthachalam Kannan. He was not involved in the new study. But he’s a chemist at New York University in New York City. For years, he has screened for many such pollutant chemicals in the environment.

For years CAD users looked at what Google and others were doing in search and wished something similar could find geometry. Advances in both software and hardware now make it possible to search by both shape and engineering attributes. Siemens PLM acquired technology for this a few years ago; more recently, Dassault Systèmes acquired Exalead for its search technology.

More than 400 different compounds had migrated from new plastic bottles into the water. Many were linked to “plasticizers.” These chemicals make the bottles squeezable. Other compounds were slip agents. Manufacturers add these to make plastic products slide easily out of the molds used to shape them. “It’s like how you would oil a baking pan so the cake doesn’t stick to the sides,” explains Tisler. Some chemicals were related to inks. These can give the bottles color or make them look shiny.

Lindsey Konkel Neabore likes to write stories about the environment and health for Science News for Students. She has degrees in biology and journalism. She has three cats, Misty, Trumpet and Charlotte, and one dog, Lucky.

Water stored in older plastic bottles contained the highest levels of plastic-related chemicals. Running the bottles through a dishwasher worsened the leaching. After a single wash cycle, more than 3,500 different compounds ended up in a bottle’s water. Many of these were related to dishwasher soap and might remain even after a second rinse. The pollutants appeared to stick more to the plastic bottles than they did to glass ones. Dishwashing also appeared to boost the release of a plastic’s chemicals.

hormone: (in zoology and medicine) A chemical produced in a gland and then carried in the bloodstream to another part of the body. Hormones control many important body activities, such as growth. Hormones act by triggering or regulating chemical reactions in the body. (in botany) A chemical that serves as a signaling compound that tells cells of a plant when and how to develop, or when to grow old and die.

They let water sit for 24 hours in new bottles, in used bottles and in bottles that had just come out of a dishwashing machine. Afterward, they used mass spectrometry to test the water. That device can essentially weigh (get the mass) of various chemicals in a sample to identify them. Tisler and Christensen compared what they found in the water from plastic bottles to substances present in water that had been stored in glass.

analytical: (in chemistry) A field that focuses on ways to separate materials into their parts or elements or to study the composition of materials.

Another way Solidworks is delaying the handoff is with a new way to extract and display assemblies. Treehouse is a slick tool in core Solidworks for visual assembly structure planning, creation, editing, and viewing. It is an old idea with its roots in the Computervision era, but it’s now possible to implement it in a modern interface.

Journal:​ J. Peretz et al. Bisphenol A and reproductive health: Update of experimental and human evidence, 2007–2013. Environmental Health Perspectives. Vol. 122, August 1, 2014, p. 775. doi: 10.1289/ehp.1307728.

He enlisted the help of Selina Tisler, a scientist in his lab. At the time, she recalls, “We didn’t know what we were looking for.”

environment: The sum of all of the things that exist around some organism or the process and the condition those things create. Environment may refer to the weather and ecosystem in which some animal lives, or, perhaps, the temperature and humidity (or even the placement of things in the vicinity of an item of interest).

pollutant: A substance that taints something — such as the air, water, our bodies or products. Some pollutants are chemicals, such as pesticides. Others may be radiation, including excess heat or light. Even weeds and other invasive species can be considered a type of biological pollution.

But the MBD conversation always seemed to be at the high end of the market. Three recent changes are bringing MBD to mainstream engineering:

“If you do use a plastic sports bottle, fill it up and use it right away,” Tisler adds. “It’s best not to store water in them overnight or for long periods of time.”

disrupt: (n. disruption) To break apart something; interrupt the normal operation of something; or to throw the normal organization (or order) of something into disorder.

The Danish team identified some chemicals that are potentially harmful. Future studies could determine how much of each chemical is there, says Kannan. And that’s important, he adds. Just because a chemical is in water doesn’t mean it will cause problems. Much of the risk will depend on how much of a chemical actually gets into the body, he explains.

Much of what Solidworks does with each release is make hundreds of little improvements that keep users coming back for more. Notable among the 2015 tweaks are these advances:

Solidworks claims the use of MBD for drawingless product detailing and 3D PMI delivery can save up to 50% on product development costs, by reducing rework, scrap, tooling, and fabrication. Solidworks MBD supports both 3D PDF, fast becoming an industry standard, and its own eDrawings 2D/3D display technology, which is popular among Solidworks users.

toxic: Poisonous or able to harm or kill cells, tissues or whole organisms. The measure of risk posed by such a poison is its toxicity.

leach: (in geology and chemistry) The process by which water (often in the form of rain) removes soluble minerals or other chemicals from a solid, such as rock, or from sand, soil, bones, trash or ash.

The Solidworks portfolio now consists of 19 separate products, including a variety of tools for simulation, plastic injection molding, electrical engineering, and technical documentation. While many of these products are tuck-ins that appear inside Solidworks, several are complementary applications that have their roots not in Solidworks but in the 3D Experience technology that shapes the rest of Dassault’s products.

Journal:​ ​​S. Tisler and J.H. Christensen. Non-target screening for the identification of migrating compounds from reusable plastic bottles into drinking water. Journal of Hazardous Materials. Vol. 429, May 5, 2022, p. 128331. doi: 10.1016/j.jhazmat.2022.128331.

consumer: (n.) Term for someone who buys something or uses something. (adj.) A person who uses goods and services that must be paid for.