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Plastics

SOLIDWORKS – Empowering Design Innovation

SOLIDWORKS provides a wide range of tools for solving the most complex tasks, as well as extensive capabilities for completing work on critical details. New features will help you improve your product development process so you can get innovative products to market faster.

GEO-MENTOR is an authorized SOLIDWORKS reseller in Ukraine and Eastern Europe.

SOLIDWORKS Plastics

Predict and avoid manufacturing defects in plastic parts and injection molds, eliminating costly rework, improving part quality, and reducing time to market.

SOLIDWORKS Plastics offers computer-aided engineering (CAE) simulation tools that predict how molten plastic flows during the injection molding process—a manufacturing method used to produce more than 80% of all plastic products. The ability to predict how plastic will flow allows manufacturers to anticipate production defects. With the ability to predict these defects, users can modify mold geometry, processing conditions, or the plastic used to minimize potential defects, thereby saving energy, natural resources, time, and money.

Benefits

  • Avoid hidden costs: SOLIDWORKS Plastics products can be used to optimize part wall thickness, gate placement, guide system size, and layout to ensure the mold works correctly the first time, reducing or eliminating the need for rework.
  • Reduce manufacturing defects and scrap: SOLIDWORKS Plastics makes it easy to analyze design iterations early in the product development cycle, when the cost of changes is minimal and the impact on manufacturability is greatest. This improves part quality and minimizes scrap rates.
  • Reduce time to market: SOLIDWORKS Plastics helps predict and avoid potential manufacturing defects before any mold tooling is cut, virtually eliminating the need for time-consuming and costly mold rework and ensuring timely project and delivery deadlines are met. Within budget.
  • Avoid inefficient "islands of automation": SOLIDWORKS Plastics provides tools for automatically generating reports that facilitate the sharing and interpretation of simulation results, enabling greater collaboration between development teams across different sites.

STANDARD

Make sure that the details are manufactured during the design process. The easy-to-learn and use SOLIDWORKS Plastics Standard program is fully integrated into SOLIDWORKS CAD, allowing you to analyze and modify part designs while simultaneously optimizing shape, fit, and function.

PROFESSIONAL

Based on the SOLIDWORKS Plastics standard for mold design analysis. With easy-to-use tools, you can quickly analyze mold layouts with single and multiple cavities, as well as families, including runners, gates, and sprues, to evaluate cycle time and optimize the feed system design.

PREMIUM

Includes SOLIDWORKS Plastics Professional with advanced modeling features for analyzing the placement of cooling lines in molds and warpage of parts. Cooling line optimization minimizes cycle time and reduces manufacturing costs.

Comparison of functions
Standard
Professional
Premium
Ease of use

SOLIDWORKS Plastics is fully integrated into SOLIDWORKS 3D CAD for ease of use and data integrity. Using the same user interface (UI) as in SOLIDWORKS, in toolbars, menus, and context-sensitive context menus ensures quick familiarization. Built-in tutorials and online search assist in training and troubleshooting.

Reuse of design data

SOLIDWORKS Plastics supports SOLIDWORKS materials and configurations for convenient analysis of multiple loads and product configurations.

Materials database

With over 4000 commercial grades of thermoplastics, you can browse and select the ones you need from the customizable built-in material library.

Creating a grid

SOLIDWORKS Plastics includes the following mesh generation features:

  • Mesh creation and analysis setup wizard
  • Automatic meshing
  • Local mesh refinement
  • Global mesh refinement
  • Boundary mesh (shell)
  • Solid 3D mesh

 

Parallel computing (multi-core)

3D Solver uses a multi-core processor (multiple threads).

Filling phase (1st stage injection)

Predicts how the material fills the cavity. The results include the distribution of pressure and temperature within the cavity, as well as the detection of possible short circuits and weld lines.

Location of automatic gates

Automatically identifies up to 10 injection points in the cavity of the part. SOLIDWORKS Plastics adds injection points to the part based on geometry and an optimized balanced filling pattern.

Instant fill schedule

Predicts the form of plastic flow through the cavity at the end of filling.

Analysis of depressions

Predicts the depth of depressions after the part has been removed and cooled to room temperature.

eDrawings support

Results can be exported to eDrawing®.

Filling time

The time required to complete the entire form.

Ease of filling

Displays the quality of the injection process with the inscription “filling reliability”.

Results consultant

User assistant for interpreting results.

Nominal wall thickness consultant

Analyzes the thickness of the part and finds a high thickness coefficient.

Pressure at the end of filling

Displays the maximum pressure for filling the cavity.

Flow front temperature

Displays the temperature history of the melting front.

Temperature at the end of filling

Displays the cavity temperature field at the end of filling.

Shear rate

Displays the shift speed achieved at the end of filling for quality verification of the injection process.

Cooling time

Evaluates cooling time when analyzing fill time.

Welding lines

Displays the weld lines formed at the junction of two (or more) melt fronts.

Air traps

Shows the place where high-pressure air can enter the cavity.

Traces of the shell

Displays the location of the weights.

Fraction of frozen layer at the end of pouring

Displays the share of frozen material in the part at the end of filling.

Clamping force

Displays the minimum clamping force for the current injection process.

Cycle time

Displays the cycle time for the current injection process.

Symmetry analysis

Avoid modeling both cavities in a symmetrical mold layout, which saves computer time for modeling.

Compression phase (2nd stage injection)

Evaluates the freezing process of the material in the cavity. Predicts the temperature for assessing hot spots, freezing gates, and cycle time. Results of pressure distribution, stress, and shrinkage are also available.

Runner balancing

Defines the runner parameters for balancing the filling between parts.

Master of runner design

Automates the process of creating common devices and flow control components, such as gates, guides, and runners.

Sprues and runners

Quickly and easily simulate the effects of runner and gate layout.

Hot and cold runners

Hot channels are initially filled with hot polymer at the beginning of the filling simulation.

Multi-cavity molds

Simulates multiple cavities of the same part in a single mold.

Family forms

Simulates a set of parts with various cavities in a single mold.

Inserts for molds

Enable the influence of mold inserts on modeling

Volumetric shrinkage

Displays the volumetric shrinkage distribution at the end of filling or packing.

Density at the end of packaging

Displays the density distribution at the end of filling to check the quality of the packing phase.

STL export, NASTRAN

Allows exporting the geometry of the part in STL or NASTRAN formats.

Export mechanical properties ABAQUS®, ANSYS, DigiMat®

Exports the mesh, residual stress, fiber orientation, and material data for performing nonlinear analysis.

Cooling lines

Simulates the flow of refrigerant inside for the analysis of mold cooling.

Partitions and bubblers

Special cooling line for a narrow channel into the cavity.

Conformal cooling channels

The cooling channel should follow the shape or profile of the core or mold cavity to ensure a fast and uniform cooling process.

Performer domain category

The domain category assigned to the runner makes it easy to select the runner’s conditions.

Downslope profiles

Displays the location of depressions and their depth.

Mold temperature at the end of cooling

Displays the temperature distribution of the mold at the end of cooling.

Displacement due to residual stress

Displays the distribution of displacement due to stress in the form.