What's New in Altair Manufacturing Solver 2021.0 - Injection Molding
Altair EmployeeLet’s have a look at the key features of Altair Manufacturing Solver (AMS) 2021 for Injection Molding!
FSI Simulation
The injection forces during the molding process can deform the mold assembly or the part inserts in the model. Hence it is important to accurately perform fluid-structure analysis and estimate the mold or part insert deformation. The solver has implemented a one-way coupling with Optistruct to compute stress using the forces and temperature computed during the molding process. The AMS solver automatically creates a runnable OptiStruct deck to perform an elastic analysis. You can import these decks in HyperMesh or SimLab to further enhance this and do more advanced analysis. A new parameter is added in the solver to perform FSI analysis automatically. When this option is enabled, the injection molding solver exports the data to perform structural analysis with OptiStruct. This helps in performing core shift analysis
Figure: Deformation of Insert when it asymmetrically positioned with the flow direction
Figure: Reduce deformation of Insert when it is symmetrically positioned with the flow direction
Fiber Orientation Analysis – Improvements
Fiber orientation analysis is enhanced by adding fiber-fiber interaction terms. This will increase the accuracy of the predicted overall fiber orientation tensor and near smooth near walls.
Figure: Fiber Orientation in Flow direction
Speedup of Packing Computations
Computation time for the packing stage is improved in version 2021. The solver has many internal parameters to control data that affect the numerical convergence and in turn the computation time. These parameters are finetuned to reduce the computational time without compromising on the solution accuracy.
Hot Runner Support
Hot runner systems are used in more than 35% of the injection molding processes. AMS solver supports the modeling of two types of hot runner systems: valve gated and thermally (open) gated systems. A new BC type called Heater BC is added to support hot runner systems. This BC allows three types of heater controls. They are
- Insulated,
- Feedback temperature control, and
- Sensor-based heater control (i.e. heater is turned ON and OFF using thermocouples)
Figure: Hot Runner BC controls
Valve Controllers
A new BC type called valve BC is added to support hot runner systems. This BC allows the opening and closing of the valve base on,
- flow front location
- Percentage filled in a part
- Time, and
- Value of pressure
There can be more than one control for a gate in sequence to open/close/open etc.
Figure: Pressure in valve gate controlled Mold. The Middle gate opens first and then left and right gates open based on flow front location sensors.
New Result - Flow Front Temperature
Flow front temperature result shows the temperature of a node when the flow front reached and filled the node. This helps understand how the temperature on the mold surface and also the temperature in weld surface regions at the time of fill.
Figure: Flow Front Temperature
Cooling Solution in the Fast Solver
A fast 3D solver for the filling phase of injection molding is introduced in the previous release. Now, this fast solution is extended to the cooling phase. This solver's computational speed is comparable to midplane analysis and now supports both the filling and cooling stages of the
solution. This is a major enhancement and enables a solution in a few minutes for filling and cooling. This fast solver does not support the packing stage, fiber orientation analysis, and models with mold.
Figure: Cooling analysis using Fast Solver
View the Release Notes and download Mechanical solver 2021 from the Altair product download page.