Simulation | product design
Chris Smith talks to Autodesk’s northern europe Moldflow specialist eric Henry about the growing use of predictive software tools in the injection moulding industry
Predicting better plastics designs
it may not be good news for prototyping firms but the long term objective of companies developing the latest computer-based predictive design and simulation tools is to take prototyping from the real to the virtual environment, putting control of the development process in the hands of the product designer. “A lot of companies today want to make fewer
physical prototypes. they want to do their prototyping on the desktop and go direct to production tooling. they want to optimise the part and the mould and the mould cooling,” says eric Henry, technical sales manager manufacturing for northern europe at engineering software specialist Autodesk, developer of the Autodesk inventor and Moldflow product lines. two of the main drivers towards the greater use of
software-based predictive tools are obvious – reduction of product development cost and shortening of time to market. But Henry says there is a third and often overlooked potential benefit available to product designers in the certainty these tools can provide. “Prototypes often raise more questions than they answer because the tooling may be different to the production tooling. there may be differences in the cooling or in mould materials. So often people see issues in volume production they did not see in prototype tooling,” he says. Henry says the vision of virtual prototyping is not a
dream, claiming that Autodesk has number of custom- ers that are using software-based predictive tools today to develop part and mould designs and are then going direct to production tooling with no start-up problems. However, he acknowledges that companies that have adopted the predictive route are in a minority, albeit a growing one. “the numbers are changing although it’s difficult to be specific,” he says. “the percentage of companies
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that have this type of technology is still relatively small but it is growing. About five years ago i would say only 5% of the injection moulding market had some predictive tools but that is increasing and there is a demand from oeMs that their suppliers make use of predictive capabilities.” it is an undisputable fact that in today’s manufactur-
ing environment design mistakes are becoming increas- ingly costly to rectify. competition for contracts – and demand from customers to deliver manufacturing solutions rather than services – means that injection moulding companies are taking on more risk, says Henry. this risk may be in the need to more accurately predict costs or it might be in taking on new tasks with which the moulder may have very little previous experience. “today a lot of customers base a new project on another they have run that may have been similar. But the tools we have show that with every new project where there is even a small change in the design it needs to be looked at, even if only to say that change
January/February 2012 | inJection world 49
Above:
Proponents of predictive
software aim to make
prototyping a virtual task
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