Rhino to Solidworks and Mass Properties in Rhino

Rhino
1

Hello!

I have 2 questions. They are as follows:

  1. I am using Rhino for generating my body and I use Rhino mostly because i find it easy to draft and I can export my mesh to .gdf format. However, since Rhino is a volume based (pardon me if this is not the proper term to use), I don’t directly get something similar to Solidowork’s “mass property” which can get me the information about the center of mass and also, Mass moment of inertia value. Can you suggest me how can I import a solid body from Rhino that can be readily recognized by solidworks and I can use its Mass Property option right away.

For the reference, I tried importing .stl file to solidworks but apparently .stl format does not allow using the “Mass Property” option in solidworks. Normally I create my solid body in Rhino this way: polyline>ExtrudeCrv(selecting the SolidBody=Yes).

  1. This one is a more of a theoretical question regarding the center of mass and Moment of Inertia. Since Rhino doesn’t allow any mass property, if I know the density of the body, how can I use Rhino’s VolumeCentroid command to get the mass moment of inertia value. That way, I can completely eliminate Solidworks from my workflow.

Thanks in advance!

2

here I found a couple formulas for standard shapes, will that help?

3

MoI_from_Calculator
MoI_from_Calculator396×571 18 KB

solidworks_output
solidworks_output521×729 19.1 KB

cuboid_body
cuboid_body1819×1222 179 KB

Thanks a lot for your response, @Gijs! But the answer from the calculator doesn’t seem to add up.