Last year, I saw a igloo that I built for myself in a former colleague who worked at SolidWorks. Both my kids and I thought it was awesome. My child always wanted to have one. I have never completed a specific project, but the idea of ​​building an ice house has never really disappeared. Now in the cold weather of New England, I can finally do something, it makes me rethink the construction of the ice house. More specifically, because I have two young children, I value the structural safety of the house. The final result I want to get is to build an igloo, let me share it with my neighbor's little friends. How to use Solidworks to help me design a safe cabin? ? The geometry of the house is 4 meters in diameter and the wall thickness is 20 cm. This geometry is very simple for analysis. But since friction plays an important part in maintaining structural stability, this will be a nonlinear analysis. Obtaining the physical properties of snow mass material is a much greater challenge, through Internet queries, can be similar to using a Drucker-Rag material model, or if the strain rate is low, a simple brittle failure model. Since the house loading is static, we can determine whether the weight of the snow block can reach the pressure yield point of our custom material to verify the stability of our model.
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The classic igloo ice house is constructed by inlaying the packed snow blocks one by one. The reason why the snow blocks can be built is to balance its own weight with the external load. If we make things simple, we can ignore any wind load (we can build the house in a windless location), load only the weight of the snow block and the friction between the block and the folded dome. 
As I first had to get a safe dome design model, I didn't consider the initial entrance to the house. This means I can use the SolidWorks Simulation 2D Simplification Tool and simulate the house as an axisymmetric analysis. The benefit of 2D simplification is that the problem is solved very quickly and without loss of precision. 
The preliminary analysis results were obtained, but there is a small area of ​​the wall between the two snow blocks that may be malfunctioning, so we need a design change. We need to thicken the walls, but if we increase the wall thickness evenly, there will be a greater load, resulting in a greater load. So let's consider a new design to optimize wall thickness. It is worth mentioning here that a nice 2D simplification feature, the analysis results can be viewed in 3D, which makes it easy to interpret the results. 
The new design has been much lower than the maximum stress of the snow block failure stress. Our basic dome structure is "safe", so let's consider the entrance. Adding an entry invalidates our 2D simplification hypothesis. Such a three-dimensional model analysis can take advantage of the limited symmetry of the model to simplify our analysis and save computation time. Simplified runtimes will increase compared to 2D, so reminding us to use 2D simplification can simplify many problems, but in the end we get our solution. Now the pressure on the two concentration points looks too high, but I don't pay too much attention because they happen at the sharp corners of the model, they can easily smooth it or add a little extra snow. 
I now have a safe house design. All I am going to do is call the children of the neighbors to make snow. 