Ansys Polyflow
Ansys Polyflow accelerates design while shrinking energy and raw material demands to make your manufacturing more cost-effective and environmentally sustainable. R&D teams use this technology extensively to design and optimize processes such as extrusion, thermoforming, blow molding, glass forming, fiber drawing and concrete shaping. Design engineers use Polyflow to minimize physical prototyping when manufacturing extrusion dies or to reduce thickness variation to improve the quality of thermoformed or blown products.
Overview
Because of a unique inverse die design capability, you can cut dies much faster than by using traditional build-and-test methods. This translates into substantial cost reduction and time savings. Your team can improve the quality of blown and thermoformed products by running trial-and-error processes with Ansys Polyflow, rather than testing changes on the production line. Glass forming and float glass engineering simulations help designers to more quickly produce higher-quality tableware, glass containers and flat glass.
Features
- Developing Better Packaging
Deploying virtual prototyping using Polyflow enables you to better model the manufacturing process and evaluate and test a design’s behavior and durability. You can take corrective action to quickly and cost effectively design lighter packaging with better performance.
- Increasing Extrusion Line Efficiency
To meet tight tolerances that the market requires, some companies resort to trial-and-error methods for (co-)extruded plastic and rubber profiles. This approach is time intensive and costly, and it can negatively impact the environment. Using engineering simulation, including our unique inverse die design capability, you can reduce trial-and-error iterations for your extrusion lines by as much as from seven to two. Simulation insight gleaned from visualizing polymer flow allows you to quickly troubleshoot unexpected problems.
- Improving Performance with a Digital Material Laboratory
Polyflow helps you investigate behavior of new plastics and elastomers for applications as diverse as extrusion, blow molding, thermoforming, fiber spinning and film casting. Simulation allows you to test new resins, even before they have been physically produced. You can reverse-design a resin to maximize end-product performance while minimizing costs and environmental impact. ANSYS provides a vast library of mathematical material models that aid in simulating a wide variety of materials.
- Nonlinear Thermal Effects Including Radiation
Polyflow models include viscous heating to allow you to detect potential deterioration of a polymer grade or undesired rubber curing. Accurate modeling of high-temperature processes, such as glass forming, requires the use of advanced nonlinear material properties, accurate radiation prediction and the Narayanaswamy model that accounts for material stress relaxation during the cooling process.
- Fluid–Structure Interaction
Polyflow’s native fluid–structure interaction (FSI) can model thermomechanical interactions between flowing materials and surrounding solids in a fully coupled approach. When large deformations occur within the elastic zone, the mesh resolution is automatically refined to improve results quality.
- Optimization and Design Exploration
Designing equipment and processes for best results involves evaluating multiple designs and optimizing flow and geometric parameters. With Ansys Polyflow, you can declare any scalar as an optimization variable, including rheological parameters, boundary conditions and mesh displacements. Then you can use the built-in optimization algorithm to automatically minimize or maximize a given objective function based on input parameters.
