Enhanced Solution Enables Improved Manufacturing Engineering Simulation, Virtual Prototyping

ANSYS, a global innovator of simulation software and technologies designed to optimize product development processes, recently announced the release of ANSYS POLYFLOW 3.12 software for analysis of plastic and rubber processing, glass forming and food processing. This new version can handle larger problems as it includes several new solvers and modeling features tailored for specific applications. Newly built-in is the ability to provide data to structural analysis software from ANSYS, which improves the accuracy of virtual prototyping predictions.

The addition of three efficient and robust solvers -- fully coupled, multifrontal and iterative -- means users can run simulations on much larger meshes than ever before. For example, 3-D simulations for dies containing more than 3 million elements have been converged on a standard high-end computer in just a few hours. Significant speed-ups regularly exceed 100% on large simulations.

ANSYS POLYFLOW software is particularly well known for its capability in modeling viscoelastic materials, which include many plastics, rubber, pastes and dough. These materials exhibit behaviors in between those of fluids and solids and are, therefore, difficult to simulate. Applications for the software include blow molding for manufacturing plastic bottles; thermoforming for optimizing medical and food packaging; extrusion and inverse die design for developing rubber seals; and glass forming for designing tableware.