Send this page / Print this page Home / Composites News / Process & Equipment

15 Apr 2008  -  United States

New release of Moldflow Plastics Insight 6.2

Moldflow Corporation announced on March 31, 2008 the release of Moldflow Plastics Insight® (MPI®) 6.2. MPI 6.2 has significant enhancements to allow more people to work faster on larger models and interface to more applications. In addition, multiple technology enhancements allow users to improve their productivity.

The MPI 6.2, 3D Flow solver analysis speed has on average, more than doubled. This analysis speed improvement allows users to be more productive, which can result in faster turnaround time on projects. “I ran a few 3D analyses in both MPI 6.1 and MPI 6.2 and the extent to which the flow solver has increased in speed is really impressive,” says James McGuire, Senior CAE Engineer at BASF Corporation. MPI 6.2 also supports Microsoft Windows 64-bit operating systems, which results in more efficient handling of large models and an overall improvement in product performance.

A key feature in MPI 6.2 is configurable Workspaces, which allow the user interface to be customized to fit a user’s job function, knowledge, skill set and experience. Workspaces allow users to significantly reduce their implementation and support costs. This enables everyone from industrial designers to simulation analysts and process engineers to benefit from Moldflow technology by doing analysis earlier and more often in the product design cycle.

MPI 6.2 also contains technology innovations for advanced gate location optimization, a micro-mechanics model to improve warpage predictions of fiber-filled materials, the extension of 3D gas-assist analysis to predict part warpage, simulation of a new rapid heating/cooling process, venting analysis of thermoset materials and new application programming interface (API) commands that will ensure MPI continues to tightly integrate with customer’s processes and workflows.

A new data export option in MPI 6.2 allows Moldflow results to be used in HyperStudy®, Altair Engineering’s design and process optimization program. “By linking MPI and HyperStudy, design engineers have a very powerful tool to gain insight into the robustness of a plastic part design and perform multi-disciplinary trade-off and optimization studies, balancing performance and manufacturability,” says Jeff Brennan, Altair’s Vice-President of Engineering Software. “It also provides a seamless way for Moldflow results to be post-processed using Altair Engineering’s HyperView®.”

A new interface to CODE V®, the industry-leading optical design software from Optical Research Associates (ORA®), allows MPI results to be used to investigate how the molding process affects the optical properties of lenses. “The development of special optical grade plastics materials has allowed the mass production of lightweight injection molded lenses for consumer electronics, such as in the cameras of most modern cell phones,” said David Hasenauer, ORA's CODE V Product Manager. “The quality of these plastic lenses is dependent on the injection molding process and any molded-in defects, which can be predicted by Moldflow. Now users of both CODE V and MPI 6.2 can use the interface between the products to design better quality plastic lenses.”

Murali Annareddy, Moldflow Director of Product Marketing, states, “Moldflow’s driving philosophy is to develop technology partnerships with our customers that are founded on new product innovation so they can improve the design and manufacture of plastic parts.” He continued, “The release of MPI 6.2 is a perfect example of those partnerships in action as it contains numerous customer-driven enhancement requests, configurability options that allow more users to benefit from simulation, interfaces to industry-standard partner applications and speed & capacity improvements that will help reduce overall project times.”

About Moldflow Corporation
Moldflow is one of the leading providers of plastics simulation software that empowers more users to optimize more designs across their enterprise from the earliest stages of new product development. Moldflow products benefit anyone involved in the design or manufacture of plastics injection molded parts including industrial designers, mechanical design engineers, CAE analysts, mold designers, mold makers, process engineers and manufacturing engineers.

Source : Moldflow Corporation