Altair today announced that Metal Forming Research Corporation (MFRC) has joined the Altair Partner Alliance (APA) with its forging software, Advisor for Metal Forming Process and Design Expert (AFDEX). Originally developed to analyze the forging process, the software capabilities have expanded to apply to extrusion, drawing, rolling, ring rolling, and other functionalities of production lines.
"AFDEX has been developed with an emphasis on solution accuracy and user-friendliness,” said Jangho Lee, managing director at MFRC. “Since the first commercial release in 1995, AFDEX has consistently replaced costly and time-consuming trial-and-error approaches to process design in metal forming with innovative CAE approaches. It will stay as one of the most reliable friends of Altair customers, who are especially confronted with technical obstacles in metal processing.”
AFDEX is based on rigid-elasto/thermo/viscoplastic finite element method and holds an exceptional strength in plate forging, an integrated process of sheet metal forming and cold forging. It also provides an accurate analysis for a wide range of metal forming processes, with intelligent automatic meshing and re-meshing schemes embedded. AFDEX includes a user-friendly interface equipped with fool-proof capabilities and fully-automatic simulation techniques which have been adopted for the cases of multi-stage processes. In addition, strong metal flow line prediction on the arbitrary cross-sectional area and powerful material identification streamline the metal forming process for more efficient results.
“Forging is an important manufacturing process where simulation has become indispensable in shortening lead time, especially for complex parts,” said Subir Roy, Senior Director of Industry Solutions at Altair. “The accuracy of AFDEX and its intuitive workflow will be valuable and highly appreciated by users interested in improving part quality and optimizing multi-stage cold and hot forging processes.”
AFDEX predicts forming loads to assist in selecting appropriate presses. It also develops and optimizes the metal forming processes which allows process design tryouts to be removed, reducing development time and cost. It also enhances product quality in terms of fiber flows and longer life spans and increases productivity by prolonging die life.
