CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
3 August 2004
Product News
Moldflow Launches Moldflow Plastics Insight Release 5.0
Moldflow Corporation announced the release of Moldflow Plastics Insight® (MPI®) 5.0. With a strong focus on 3D technology, pre- and post-processing productivity improvements and packed with a wide range of customer driven enhancements, MPI 5.0 redefines "the best" by delivering even more comprehensive solutions to address today's manufacturing issues and support all design analysis geometry types associated with plastics molding processes.
The software offers the world's largest database of its kind with more than 7,800 materials characterized for use in plastic CAE analysis. MPI 5.0 offers 19 distinct modules that can be used to simulate nine unique molding processes.
MPI 5.0 Highlights
MPI 5.0 provides a broad range of modeling and meshing enhancements and tools that reduce the time required to create an analysis-ready model. In addition, the product offers enhanced geometry troubleshooting diagnostics, clean-up tools, and an automatic mesh fix wizard.
MPI 5.0 offers new simulation capabilities and improved solver performance for analyzing thin-walled part designs using midplane and MPI/Fusion meshes. User interface enhancements help companies increase productivity with new tools for comparing project studies, synchronizing result selection and result properties and displaying and manipulating models in less time than ever. Numerous solver enhancements include the ability to simulate mold core deflections and evaluate the flow of one or two different materials injected into two separate geometries in a sequential process. Using MPI 5.0, filling and packing analyses run up to 40 percent faster than in previous versions of the software. Also new are a fast fill solver and options to control the opening and closing of sequential valve gates.
Paul van Huffel, senior engineer at Cascade Engineering and MPI 5.0 beta user, says, "The addition of corner effects to the warpage analysis and the new core deflection analysis will have a significant positive impact on our development of new products and molding technologies. Our customers stand to gain substantially from our use of this improved toolset. The new user-defined keys will also be a significant time-saver for us internally, thus allowing Cascade Engineering to get more work done in less time. MPI 5.0 will definitely help us to be more effective and more productive."
New 3D innovations help users simulate the gas-assisted injection molding process and evaluate the effect of polymer or metal inserts on the cooling and warpage of the plastic part. In addition, the software helps predict core deflection, packing and warping of thermoset materials and dynamic paddle-shift in the microchip encapsulation process. Other enhancements include more robust and efficient 3D mesh generation and a new 3D probe result for examining result values through the part thickness.
According to MPI 5.0 beta user Gal Sherbelis, owner of GS Design, "The highlights of the release for me are two new and very significant features-core shift analysis and full 3D gas injection analysis that will enable the analysis of virtually any gas-injected geometry. Prior to using MPI 5.0, the ability to simulate gas injected parts was limited. Thick sections had to be modeled with beam elements. Being able to model complex thick sections as true 3D features will solve this problem."
Adds Sherbelis, "MPI 5.0 delivers significant improvements on three fronts: reduction in modeling time; reduction in analysis time; and new features. For example, the new mesh repair wizard goes a significant way towards complete model creation. It automatically removes many problems, reducing the amount of sites in the model that require manual clean-up. I found an approximately 25 percent reduction in analysis time on large Fusion models with and without fiber analysis."
MPI 5.0 also offers standard verification cases to validate the accuracy of key analysis solvers, and solver support for hardware with Red Hat and SuSE Linux operating systems equipped with 64-bit Intel Itanium 2 and AMD 64-bit Opteron processors, respectively.
Pricing and availability
MPI 5.0 is available today. For pricing and more information, contact your local Moldflow representative. Or, visit http://www.moldflow.com/ for more product information.
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