This year's Moldex3D Users' Meeting, held on 26, October, 2007, was finished successfully. Moldex3D R9.0 pre-announcement, several marvelous speeches of keynote speakers, famous academicians from well-known universities, users presentations and so on are what you missed at this year's Moldex3D Users' Meeting – Europe 2007.

 

The meeting began with a joint plenary session where the President of Moldex3D, Dr. Venny Yang, welcomed the meeting attendees, introduced the special guests and highlighted the main topics. Following his talk, Dr. David Hsu, Vice President of Moldex3D, unveiled the enhanced functions and new features of Moldex3D R9.0. He said "The release of R9.0 will be the newly achievement of simulation technologies, offering new functions and capabilities that enables users to complete evaluation and solve potential designproblems more efficiently."

The 3D viscoelastic residual stress prediction is the breaking-through technology in the coming new release. The flow-induced stress plays an important role, especially for thin-wall molding. It is caused by the high shear rate of plastics flow during filling, and might be relaxed or frozen during the post-filling process and after ejection. Moreover, it will affect the thermo-mechanical performance, long-term dimensional stability and optical properties. Now this new 3D capability is developed in the coming new release to provide high-reliable analysis results of flow-induced residual stress. Furthermore, the optical properties of final part can be clearly observed, such as birefringence.

Many studies have indicated that reasonable material properties are important factors influencing the accuracy of structural analyses results for fiber-reinforced polymer composite. However, non-linear constitutive behavior of material model is very difficult to be conducted and handled. "Material modeling technology is the foundation of FEA. Moldex3D-DIGIMAT interfaces enable accurate and efficient multi-scale material and structure modeling of composite structures taking into account the process induced material microstructure." said Roger Assaker from e-Xstream Engineering. The application of Moldex3D-DIGIMAT is typically and generally used in the engineering plastics fields where DIGIMAT can be used to model the linear and nonlinear material behavior of glass-reinforced thermo-plastic injection molded parts. In the presented case, DIGIMAT typically took the fiber orientation predicted by Moldex3D injection molding software into account and acted as the micro-mechanical material model within the Abaqus structural finite element analysis software. The results clearly demonstrated the Abaqus structural analysis is now much closer to realistic non-linear world. Moreover, the interface between DIGIMAT and Moldex3D is also available for ANSYS and LS-DYNA.

In present industrial applications, most of the hot runner systems are suitable for molding large-sized products. Only a few studies focus on small-sized hot runner system of multi-cavity products. However, "when people face multiple micro components fabrication or want to put multiple micro structures in small-spaced products, how to reduce waste materials, to shorten the cycle time, to lower the cost are the major concerns." said Prof. Shi-Chang Tseng from National Yunlin University of Science and Technology. In his speech, he demonstrated a new hot runner system to enhance the product development. To help the audience understand more clearly, twelve cell-phone keypads were selected as an example. Prof. Tseng also showed one of the key components, micro runner tubes were fabricated by integrating micro grinding, polishing and electroforming. In addition, the development is also utilized computer simulation to obtain more uniform flow and thermal fields inside the micro hot runner module.

Except these two guest speakers' presentations, we also had user presentation from Optim Test Center, LG Electronics and SAMSUNG., FE-Design, technological partner speeches from Abaqus Deutschland GmbH, Beaumont Technologies, Inc. and so on. The meeting arose many discussions and more importantly it provided inputs and feedbacks to drive future product development.

Moldex3D appreciated your coming. With your passionate participation and contribution, this year's users' meeting is so fabulous. We believed that everyone had learned about the latest achievement in Moldex3D simulation technology and discovered new fields in the plastics world. Thank you for coming and we are looking forward to seeing you again soon.  

Moldex3D - True 3D CAE for Injection Molding