Complex Part Design with Collaboration and Analysis: Using Glovius CAD Viewer for the Plastics Industry

Plastics have wide applications in a variety of industries including packaging, electronics, aerospace, automobile, medical, and transportation.

Injection molding is one of the most common methods to manufacture plastics, and involves injecting molten raw material as fine pellets or powder into a mold and applying pressure. A number of HCL Glovius CAD Viewer customers design, engineer, and manufacture plastic components. Some own plants with multiple cells of injection molding machines and some make machines used to manufacture the plastic components and their molds.

This process is like die-casting of metals. Both the design and manufacture of plastics using injection molding requires complex software handling. This makes Glovius CAD viewer, which has specific analysis tools suited for manufacturing plastics and especially for components made using injection molding-an essential part of a modern injection molding operation.

Owing to the flexibility of the material, plastics designers can choose more complex shapes in 3D to achieve the form, fit, and function of the design. When the designs are more complex, the ability to interrogate and understand the design in 3D using CAD software is critical. As more manufacturing companies go digital and adopt paperless manufacturing methods, the ability to consume this 3D data for downstream processes like should-costing, integration, manufacturing, production, and QC becomes especially important. Using software like Glovius for design analysis is highly beneficial not only for improving collaboration among teams involved in production runs, but also saves on the costs involved with adopting a CAD application.

Here are few ways to use Glovius in design and manufacture of plastics :

Visualize Part Design: Glovius facilitates the visualization and identification of all stages of a complex part design. As the design gets more intricate and complex, the mold design grows in complexity, as does the manufacturing process. Different CAD formats such as CATIA, Solidworks, NX, Creo, Inventor are supported, which means costs can be streamlined and customers using different CAD applications can be served.

Part Design Attributes: Glovius offers an Analyze tool to provide a part overview and identify key physical attributes. With a single click, calculate the extent dimension, volume, and total surface area that directly affects the cost of manufacture of the component. Mass can also be calculated for the part based on standard materials or by assigning a custom density to specific plastic compounds.

Draft Analysis: Drafts in a part design are essential to ensure proper ejection and separation of the part from the mold/die during the mold opening and removal steps. The Draft Analysis tool in Glovius allows the calculation of the draft angles of all faces with respect to the parting face. Apart from the standard planes in the part, you can choose custom planes or any planar surface in the component as the parting plane. Set margins and step values and assign custom colors to draft angle values based on the manufacturing operations or accept norms.

Thickness Analysis: Glovius has a powerful tool called Thickness Analysis to analyze the material distribution of the part. Identify the thick and thin regions to highlight the probable areas of concern in the design. Structurally weak thin wall sections can cause the component to fail during operations and during the injection step, they can restrict the even flow of material or create air pockets causing defects in the manufactured component. Thin structures may also cool faster, leading to warpage from uneven shrinkage. Any abrupt changes to the design can also retain unintended stresses that lead to higher rejection rates. Conversely, thicker regions highlight the case of an over-optimized design that leads to heavier weight and consequently increases the cost to manufacture the plastic component. Thicker regions may also lead to improper cooling causing thermal stresses to build up that eventually cause the part to fail in use.

Efficient, cost-efficient, and well-rounded, Glovius can be accessed on smartphones, tablets, and laptops, enabling overall smarter and faster collaboration while maximizing material use.

Click here to download the case study and find out how Glovius improved turnaround times and saved CAD license costs for a plastics manufacturing company.

Download Glovius today for a free 15-day trial and experience how to significantly improve your team’s throughput. Reach out to us for any questions or schedule a demo.

Sridhar Oruganti
Product Manager, Glovius