Moldex 3D 2023: What Engineers Need to Know

What’s changed and does Moldex stand out in the mold flow analysis field?

When CoreTech System was founded in 1995, the goal was to help engineers and product designers create better injection molded components. Plastic injection molding, like almost every other manufacturing process, is wildly different in 2023 than it was thirty years ago. Today, engineering requirements are more complex compared to the manufacturing design environment when I graduated college. Fortunately, the tools available to simulation engineers today are also light years ahead of what was available back then.

Caption - Cooling Channel Simulation Helps Engineers Dissipate Mold Heat. (Image courtesy of Moldex3D).

Caption – Cooling Channel Simulation Helps Engineers Dissipate Mold Heat. (Image courtesy of Moldex3D).

CoreTech’s flagship software, Moldex, recently announced its 2023 release. This new update offers big improvements from the previous outing, with most of the benefits coming from the software’s computational upgrades.

But the existence of such a niche simulation software begs a question: Is it best to buy big, sweeping software suites like Ansys, Altair or Simcenter? Or is a hyper-focused application designed only for polymer optimization the way to go? Let’s go over the additions to Moldex3D 2023 and answer those questions.

What’s New in Moldex3D 2023?

The Moldex3D 2023 literature shows that the improvements of the software focus on four areas: reliability, efficiency, augmentation and liberation (or as the marketing would call it, getting REAL).

The reliability improvements start with updates to the materials parameters. The idea here is to make sure that the results obtained from the software are valid. The company performed over 400 warpage studies in the last year and compared them with physical components to check the fidelity of the results with respect to shrinkage, weight and crystallinity. This is an incredible example of taking the concept of digital twin and applying it to real-world systems. CoreTech also made improvements to the software’s air-effect predictions and the design of cooling lines and heat dissipation.

Caption - Warpage Verification Takes Advantage of 400 Physical-to-Digital Verification Studies. (Image courtesy of Moldex3D).

Caption – Warpage Verification Takes Advantage of 400 Physical-to-Digital Verification Studies. (Image courtesy of Moldex3D).

The efficiency changes in this release are significant. Moving to multi-core and cluster parallel computing, and making the software compatible with cloud applications, is resulting in some huge efficiency leaps from 2022 to 2023. Time to results for enhanced warp simulation dropped from 113.57 to 62.92 minutes, roughly cutting the time to solve these studies in half. Annealing studies on a dropped from 72.28 minutes to 27.83 minutes. This reduced time to results is going to free up time for engineers to perform more studies or move on to new projects.

Several other efficiency changes are outlined by CoreTech, but the upgrade to clusters and adding cloud computing functionality are the big headlines here.

Augmentation means that some of the current functions in Moldex3D are getting new features added, and the one that stands out to me is fabric layer design optimization. Engineers who deal with resin transfer molding (RTM) and sheet molding compound (SMC) can now interface with LS-DYNA and Abaqus models to efficiently build simulations for the layered materials. The ability to present results is also getting a boost, with a new feature that gives multiple users across an organization the ability to create reports with consistent high-quality graphics and settings.

Moldex3D 2023 also has improvements that are designed to liberate the engineer from time consuming activities. For instance, the improvements made to the application programming interface (API) can help users to script functions that are often repeated, and also build arrays of studies that test multiple parameters.

The iMolding Hub is a new feature that also falls under this category. It helps manufacturers build a database of internal molding machines and keep data on each specific device. This will help both product and manufacturing engineers to plan future jobs, schedule current production, troubleshoot quality issues and manage support personnel.

Simulation That Does Everything? Or Just One Thing?

When engineering managers look for simulation software to analyze their plastic components, there are many considerations to keep in mind. The companies that come to mind as simulation leaders have flow analysis simulation already. After all, analyzing the flow of plastic in a mold is a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) problem, right? And we know that the big hitters in simulation count CFD as a core competency.

Ansys has Polyflow, a tool “used to reduce the cost of polymer, glass, metals and cement processing.” Inspire Mold from Altair helps simulation engineers design components and the molds that create them. Moldflow is the tool that I always heard plastic engineers talk about using in the 1990s, and that software is now a proud member of the Autodesk family of products. SOLIDWORKS Plastics might have the best marketing blurb of all. It says it can “predict and avoid manufacturing defects in plastic part and injection mold designs, eliminating costly rework, improving part quality and decreasing time to market.”

This is exactly what we want out of simulation software. Big plastic prototype companies also have their own methods of analyzing plastic flow. Beyond these options are several smaller niche products that will help engineers to design plastic injection molds and components, and even a few open-source options led by OpenFoam and its OpenCFD product.

Does an engineering manager have to choose between the big players of simulation with catalogs spanning all aspects of engineering or smaller companies that have a laser focus on plastic component design? It turns out the answer is no.

One of the recurring themes in the current simulation landscape over the last few years is partnerships. Large companies work with small companies, large companies acquire small companies and large companies license the small companies’ products for existing customers. A short online search showed that Moldex is already an Ansys technology partner as part of a partnership between Ansys and CoreTech. NX EasyFill is an older partnership between Siemens and Moldex. Altair HyperMold is a tool that can interface with Moldex models and analyses.

If decision makers in a company are on the fence about purchasing only one tool, either an expansive suite or a mold-flow solution, it looks like there are options for everyone.

What Does It All Mean?

Plastic injection molding, to me, is a unique development process because the mold layout is just as important as the component design. When I’ve designed injection molded components during my engineering career, mold considerations happened during the part design.

Can we open and close the mold without adding a slide? Will this part design require additional cores? Where will the parting line go, and how much draft can we handle in each direction?

There were usually manufacturing engineers who could figure out cycle times, how many cavities would be in the mold, the material and the post-processing operations required for the mold to meet our production schedule. But before we threw it over the wall to the manufacturing engineers our geometry and mold plan needed to be in place.

Mold flow analysis software is ultimately an engineering tool for optimization. Plastic part and plastic mold designers are in the same resources crunch as the rest of us. Timelines are being compressed, quality requirements are moving higher and costs are still artificially high—or maybe permanently higher due to the pandemic and supply chain issues.

Engineers need to know that their simulation tools will provide results with a high degree of fidelity and enable their component and assembly projects to come in faster with better quality. Moving the simulation further up the design process helps to save costs related to last-minute changes, reduce the number of prototypes required for a project and the related costs and enable the engineers to complete more projects in a year.

Moldex3D offers a narrower focus compared to the simulation giants in the industry. Dealing only with polymer component design and development means that the Moldex3D engineers have a solid foundation of polymer properties, flow and material selection. The changes made for Moldex3D 2023, especially in the areas of computing power and feature refinement, should make its customers happy.