Moldflow Insight Fundamentals

[Music] hello everybody i wanted to welcome you to the class here that is about an overview of autodesk moflow insight we're going to look at really the user interface we're going to look at the mesh different mesh types what a good quality meshes we'll look at process setup we'll dig into results as well and interpretation really understanding kind of what the results show or possibly what they don't show i will also talk about if you have questions beyond this class when you're using software and i just want to end with a little bit about what other technologies are available within mo flow besides just injection molding so my name is tim van ast i am a principal implementation consultant i've been with autodesk for a little over four years but i've been a customer before joining rds for for over 20 years so really i'm very passionate about mold flow about helping customers to learn understand and implement moflow really to see the value that that i've seen from the software for a lot of years so to start with let's let's look at software here and i will be sort of bouncing back and forth between software and powerpoints here but we want to start out with the interface right if you're new to mold flow insight we'll start at the very basics here so moflow insight if you've installed it on your computer you will find most likely on your desktop you'll find an m with a little i on there a few things to note if you've installed it you might also find one with an m with a little c which would actually be for balfour communicator which is sort of a results output that anybody can view as long as they have mobile communicator which is a free download but a few things to note if you're looking in your start menu and you're trying to find moflow insight what you'll actually find for buttons to click is moflow synergy so a quick note of that when you install moflow there are two installs one is moflow synergy which is actually the interface it's everything you see and do and touch and the second installation is moflow insight that is actually the solver and there are two separate installations and the great thing is if something were to happen in synergy the interface were to crash insight would still be solving in the background and any jobs that you have running wouldn't actually die they would continue to run you can simply open up insight synergy and off you go but so just you're aware there are two separate programs that are actually going even though we call it insight it's synergy is what we see and use whenever we touch the software so it is a single environment pre and post processing it's all in the same software and we'll look at this in fact i'll probably uh just break off in just a minute into software but we've got a few things right the environment toolbar the display window where we see our part we've got log files we've got the project files uh study tasks layers and notes so now i'd say is a perfect time let's hop over here and let's look at this now i already have a project started with some studies in there but let's assume that we're going to start a new one so i'm going to go ahead and import to start with and we're going to find the file we're looking for it's going to come up here you can say okay to here really the only option that i ever change is what mesh types that i would like to eventually end up with at this point it doesn't really matter i can change it once i'm in software as well so in this case i'm actually going to switch to dual domain and coming up a little bit i'll describe what the difference between a mid plane mesh a dual domain mesh and a solid 3d mesh is so we'll start with that one of the things that i didn't mention there that you can look at is the available file types that we can import you know step file is what this one is that's sort of the universal solid translation out of any cad software but really just know that actually you know molfo can import most native or at least the the major made of native cad packages directly so if it's a creole part or a catia or a solidworks part you can actually import the the native found directly if for some reason that might not work or you don't have access to that a step file is probably the most common one that's used to import so we see our part here one thing of note that's a little more beyond the interface but i mention it now because i've always gotten into the habit of doing this when it first comes in one of the things mofo wants to see and needs to see is the orientation of our part the mold open and closed direction needs to follow the z axis so here we see a z if i rotate this a little this tells me mold open and close needs to be in this direction in this case i see it is properly aligned if it weren't i would need to go to either geometry or mesh tab and do a rotate in order to rotate my part say 90 degrees in the x maybe that would now put it in z being open close again in this case it was correct but that's one of the things i always want to do when i first import my part so if we look at the interface then again clearly here is our our our model here is where we get to see everything that we're going to do and touch the m in the top corner this is sort of the start button for moflow here we have a lot of things like you know new project to new files new studies open save export publish print that type of stuff the other thing we'll see is there's a lot of other files here these were the previously used projects that i had used also search commands if i'm up here especially if you're new to the software if i'm looking for something like uh where did that merge node or is it global merge whatever if i type something in there it gives me sort of uh breadcrumbs here to sort of see hey where is it okay so it's the mesh tab and it's the mesh edit panel and then merge nodes or wherever that is so that's a pretty slick way again especially if you're kind of getting used to moflow to find commands if you can't seem to find them where they naturally are the other thing here is the options button so if i click the options here we get to i guess what i would call well software options software preferences settings whatever you'd like to call it but this is where we get to the settings for the software there aren't a lot that i change here but i'll point out a few that i do things like auto save you know it's always annoying when you get the little wheel of weight while you're just like i was about to do something and all of a sudden it's saving but that also can save your bacon for sure when you've worked on something for a half an hour and all of a sudden you know power goes out software goes down something like that so you can set that here you can also set units whatever your default units you want to see here there's another place i will show you here in just a second we can do that uh so the one thing here is directories so here you can set your default project directory i think the default values that show up when you install the software is usually your user folder and more and more user folders aren't actually located on their local machine a lot of times they're up on a network somewhere and i'll just give you a hint here moflow generally doesn't like to be working on files when they're stored on a network it'll get some lag based on network speed and can potentially give you some errors if there's a glitch in network speed sort of as you're doing something so i highly recommend you do it local and then once you do that it just makes it simpler to to to find your files all in one location the other one that's really huge is the mouse tab here i can actually set a lot of different settings for my mouse as far as rotate pan dynamic zoom and this really is the place you can help yourself out by setting your mouse settings so that they match whatever cad system or other programmer you're used to using mofl has their defaults but you know go with whatever you're used to for me i set pan in the middle and rotate on the right mouse button i also set mouse apply by using a control button and center of rotation by the middle with the control button so by doing that i can kind of use a lot of stuff just with mouse without having to click the specific buttons elsewhere the one other thing that i will show here on the options is in results if you're looking at a result you have the option of displaying both units in the result file itself so the fact that i'm on metric i can click here and english units will be dually displayed the only downside of doing that is it just takes more room on the screen but really generally that's not an issue so that one can be a good one you might like as well so that's the m button up here the next thing is this very top row here is what we call to be our quick start or our quick options here the thing that's nice about this is things like if we go to the view tab here is another place we can change our units anytime there's a button you can actually right click on that and you can add that to your quick access toolbar so that's what i've done here to get the units up here that way if i'm in my mesh and i'm changing something i don't have to go back in order to change my units i can basically do that up here so anytime you see a button from for something you can add it to the quick access bar other things that are important here on quick access bar of course the all important undo button of course redo and if you want to undo multiple steps you can actually select that for the history so those are really good there as well next thing we want to look at here again this is our sort of a standard windows ribbon style of menu again if i see geometry here this will then go to my geometry tab i can select either one of these it will get me to the same place i don't have to go back to the home tab to go to the mesh tab if i like i can select directly on the mesh tab and everything here is designed to be roughly a left to right approach right we want to import our part we can set our mesh type if we decided a different mesh type then when we imported here it's very easy to change that again we can mess with geometry we can mesh with our mesh whatever settings we want for the analysis sequence materials again left to right we're ultimately moving ourselves over to results and potentially a report if we want to go there next we look at the project area here again in this case i have my cell phone cover and i have multiple options and versions of the cell phone cover if i then wanted to do not a cell phone cover but a front bumper of my car i would probably create a new project in a new instance the software and not continue to just add them to the project pane because it would just get really confusing trying to find all of the files of all the projects that i might do but within this i can certainly do multiple versions of the cover all within this once we have one of these open we see we can come down here to the study tasks so these are all the individual things i can do to this specific study and these settings that i select here might be different than the other studies that i've selected here so down below here is layers whenever i import we'll see that i get a folder for cad geometry i also get a layer for the geometry if let's see let me open up one of these others if i open up a new study we'll see there's a bunch of layers here the software does a reasonable job of sort of automating creating different layers for you but you're welcome to use layers in any way you like you're welcome to put anything in any layer you can move and adjust one eye layer to another again we can turn them on we can turn them off makes it very simple and easy for us to use if i don't like the look of this i can turn my nodes off allows me to see the mesh on my part easier again a lot of different things we can do here different ways to display what's ever in that layer again i can i can select items and move them to a different layer if i wanted so lots of easy ways to do this i can even find something that's on the screen if i do the highlight layer if i pick it you will get this little box here that shows us what layer that's in and the other way too if i sort of put my mouse over this layer we'll see that the mesh itself turned blue because it's sort of helping me find what's in this layer or what in this layer is displayed the other thing we have and i'll use this one that's already been solved we have the log files we can see the logs here we can also see the log here if i select this i get a lot of information it's just a text file a lot of information of everything as far as settings and as it solved partial results throughout this as well as different summary items at the end here and it will also show solve time whatever it took here so that's the log file the other thing once it's solved i also also have results here as well that we can see and look at down below here the one other thing that is hidden generally is if i right click i can go to study notes if i click this i will get study notes and plot notes here this would be something you know full analysis with cooling lines i can type anything i like here and what's really handy about having notes there is when i look over here i can see down below it's at the bottom of this study notes full analysis with cooling lines i can see you know copy study settings from from a previous analysis so if i open a project i don't have to open every study to see what's in it i can simply mouse over see a little bit of information and of course if i put anything in study notes i can have those in there as well so that's a basic overview of what we have as far as just the interface of the software let's talk about mash what it is why we do it oh and in fact before i even go there mesh is something that some people are very afraid of and if you are one of those the cool thing is you don't even have to mesh it ahead of time you can actually do something that we call a one click analysis we can import our cad we can orient it properly so z is the open close and we can set an injection location directly on the cat itself we can set material process conditions anything else we want to set and we can actually click start analysis the software will then in the background mesh the part and then solve the analysis and give us results a lot of times you might not do that but you might so certainly nothing wrong with do that but let's talk about if we do that step at a time and create the mesh let's look at the mesh options that are available within insight so the first thing there are three types that are used one is a beam element the second is a triangular or a shell element and finally a tetrahedral or a 3d element and secondly tied to elements you always have something called a node a node is the point at which defines the corners or ends of each element so let's look at the different types so again in general we're always going to start with a cad model that got imported and once we do that we could do something called a mid plane mesh and i'll start there because it's the oldest meshing technology been around for well a long long time and we'll talk about advantages and disadvantages of each of the three types of mid plane dual domain or tetrahedral so if we look at midplane the shell element is a flat element and what we want to end up with is elements that are basically at the midpoint or mid plane of our thickness so in this case we have you know our elements across the the base of our part as well as attach you know up to the the rib the challenge with creating a midplane of course is that we need to get those elements to the middle so there are a few ways within mole flow they're not the most robust but they do work to create a mid plane or you can actually create mid surfaces in a cad package and bring them over and mesh them the other option is there are other external softwares that will like automatically create a mid plane for you that could be used and import the mesh directly into mole flow is another way to do it so once we have these here the advantages now of a midplane is once we have our shell elements the thickness is then actually an assigned property so i could grab all the elements on the base of our part and say well you're going to be three millimeters thick and once i run that in the software it's going to know exactly what's there and then the cool thing is if i say well what if i made the wall thickness thinner what would that do what would my pressures be so i could actually go in modify the property of three millimeters to be two and a half millimeters and my new model is ready to go i didn't need different geometry i didn't need to go back to cad the downside sometimes of that though is when we look at this rib right ribs should be drafted and so in general you know the thickness at the bottom of the rib is actually thicker than at the very top of the rib and for a mid plane we need to go in there and actually assign different thicknesses at the very top maybe across the middle of the rib and then of course at the base to get the different thicknesses again the advantage is if i have the need to change thicknesses across my part often a mid plane can be a very easy way because it's easy to select elements and just change the property of the thickness so let's hop over then to the dual domain a dual domain is very similar to mid plane in that both use the same shell element but dual domain actually is what we would call it's sort of a wrapped mesh it takes the cad and it puts a skin around the outside with mesh and so we end up with what we would call basically a water-tight mesh where all of the elements connect to each other from one end of the part to the other and wrap around on the sides and the edges and everything the advantage of a dual domain is from creation of a mesh standpoint it's pretty easy because the software can wrap the mesh around the surfaces and since the software knows the elements are there it's basically going to look for if i have one element here it's going to find something that's parallel to it on the other side of the rib and once it does it'll say yeah i found my partner over there therefore what's my distance from me to that other element and so dual domain the software auto assigns all of the thicknesses for you which is really great the only downside to well two downsides to dual domain is first of all if we look at the number of elements of a dual domain compared to a midpoint it's probably pretty much twice the number of elements and so the solve time will be longer than a mid plane but it's it's generally still within reason but that is one thing that at least for me personally i'd rather my computer worked longer than me working longer to create the mesh the other time that that dual domain is not a good choice is really based on the geometry when we get to thick and chunky parts sometimes the software has a hard time really differentiating for and understanding if my part is here if it's really thick the software by default is going to say well most plastic parts aren't thicker than you know a quarter inch or six millimeters i mean even that is probably really thick you know is this really the right thickness or is if it's thicker you know it might just simply go i don't know what to do with these really thick parts so then we would really look at something like the 3d or the tetrahedral mesh since there's no assigned thicknesses it's all volume based that is really where choosing 3d mesh is really good because it's volume based it doesn't matter how thick or weird transitions from thick to thin sections it just does a good job it picks that up sort of automatically based on volume not on the sign thicknesses i will say the one downside potentially to 3d is of course if you have to do modeling changes or thickness changes you really have to go back to cad modify your cad bring it back remesh and then do something different there are some things you can do within software to work around that to not go back to cad but certainly it takes extra steps to do that now more and more i see analysts using 3d for all things not just thick parts or and i shouldn't even say just thick parts when i say thick and chunky really i'm kind of focused on parts that have lots of transitions from thicker to thinner to thinner to thick to you know lots of wall thickness variations that's really where tetrahedral mesh does its best and honestly more and more people are doing even thin walled parts with tetrahedral so all of the different mesh types have the right place and belonging in the end we'd like to solve it as fast as we can with a little amount of effort so you're always sort of juggling that tetrahedrals also do take longer than a dual domain mesh to solve but again there's nothing wrong with that it's just computer solved time so just be aware of that the other thing again if we're going to do things like runner systems you can use beams to define runners and gates for any and all of the different mesh types but as far as gates and runners go if it's not 3d we would not recommend using a shell mesh to define gates and runners but for 3d you do have the option then to actually model it with full tetrahedrals through the part the gate and the runner system so let's look let's actually hop over to software and we'll look at meshing apart so we'll come back to this one we've imparted the part but we haven't meshed it yet if i come to mesh and generate mesh so this is something that changed about three years ago or so that the way that the software changed our mesh size so here we see the default global edge length of 0.91 so just about a millimeter it's kind of saying well the default then what we would we would like is the elements to be about a millimeter across each side but if we change this value by default it won't actually change the way our mesh is created because we've changed to something that we call auto sizing so use auto sizing is the new default in the software works great it's a really robust measure and if we look at this if we wanted to change our mesh size we would actually go to the scale factor here and scale factor is where the 1 then actually references this original value even if i change this value typing something different here the 1 would still reference the 0.091 no matter what i put in here if i wanted to make a tighter mesh or more elements i could decrease this to 0.75 would give me a much finer mesh and if i said you know this really is just a quick run i just need some basic answers out of this i could make this 1.5 i can make it two to make it a much coarser mesh will solve faster maybe not be quite as accurate but it's still going to be pretty reasonably accurate and honestly the values that i see most people use and i typically use i usually don't go less than .75 if you get down to 0.5 you start to get most of the time a pretty ridiculous mesh count to be honest with you and usually so it's usually 7.75 to maybe 1.5 on a rare occasion i've gone all the way up to 2 beyond that i certainly have never used it if you ever wanted to go to the older style of meshing you could go to use global parameters instead of the auto sizing now we would actually be using the global edge length and whatever value you type here when we do that though it goes to the older style it's usually not as robust of a mesh you typically have more mesh cleanup so if we come back here go to auto mesh sizing we can then mesh this and i'll cancel this at the moment it usually doesn't take too long to mesh but i already have one that is meshed and we can take a look at our mesh so here is the part that has been matched as a dual domain mesh again our dual domain is just a shell it's a coating again around our part so if i were to simply delete all these if we look inside of this we will see that yeah there there really isn't nothing in the middle right the elements just simply aren't there it really is the shell elements on the outside they are all looking for sort of a partner on the in on the other side and then based on that it auto defines thickness and calculates things appropriately so once we have our mesh one of the things that i always like to do is go to the mesh statistics and do a show once the mesh has been created i just want to verify whether and we can look at these down here i can also click this and this will bring a pop-up to sort of show me the overall information i want to learn what's what is a good mesh and what's a not good mesh and if there is something that needs to be cleaned up then i would do that if we close this out if i do need to clean something up like a a high aspect ratio which is really sort of our length to our height ratio if i click this the default here is looking for any aspect ratio less than 20 is acceptable so if when i see this a couple of things if i look down below here i see diagnostic generated one entity i see that the the aspect ratio of the entity is 28 it's above the recommended 20 that we would prefer i can zoom out and sort of look for the spike and i see that down here the other way if i don't see the spike once i'm on a diagnostic i can come up here the diagnostic navigator shows up i can click there and the pivot of my rotation will now be centered along where that that element is so if i come up here and i say oh wow look sure enough super long skinny i can then use all of these different mesh edit tools to find this and fix this in this case i would simply do a merge node we can see that that went away we can see that the legend over here disappeared because now everything that's visible is better than 20 so there's really nothing else that i have to fix if i don't want when i look at this i do see some of these in this area are actually sort of long skinny but they at least match the you know less than 21 ratio therefore i really don't need to fix them other ones i can look at here is thickness and this will sort of show me what the software has auto defined for the thicknesses this can be a pretty it's kind of a good way to sort of sanity check this and if you're looking at dual domain if you see some really strange results that might lend you toward actually jumping over to doing something in 3d tetrahedral mesh but i can look across here and sort of see the thick sections i can see the thinner sections turn our nodes off and here we do see a few of these things that look a little funny like is it really super thick to super thin if we scroll down there well by golly look at that based on the geometry that really is real okay i think i'm okay then but if you ever see stuff that simply doesn't make sense that might be the place to say maybe i should go to 3d actually and over here same thing i might question this area but if i rotate i'll see well sure enough that is actually a thick section there the other thing we can note if we do look at mesh statistics i'll bring this up one more time and if we look at the very bottom here it will give you sort of a hint not suitable for dual domain or it will say okay if it says not suitable then your best bet honestly is to actually jump over and to run this in 3d and again so you might back this out mash it to 3d a few different ways to do that so i do have one that is meshed as 3d already if we come over here we can see the mesh is off in the layers but let's turn that off second if i come over to this end again if i do the same trick let's delete all these if i look in the end of this we can see all of these tetrahedral elements just smashed in there so that's the way we know they're in there and we can see that so we're going to undo that because we didn't actually want to delete our elements again we can run a mesh statistics on the 3d because tetrahedral elements are very different than shell elements there's actually sort of a lot less to look at here we're still looking for maximum aspect ratio we actually recommend it to be less than 100 so here we do have some that are exceeding what we recommend but key thing for this with the software meshes with a 3d tetrahedral mesh we generally don't recommend that you actually fix anything first of all there's not a lot you can actually do to fix it all of the mesh diagnostics are sort of gone from here you can do the different mesh edit tools but generally with the 3d because there's so many elements packed in there honestly when you try to fix something you tend to break other things so we actually recommend that it isn't done that you don't fix it unless for some reason you try to solve and it literally errors out on you the other thing of note if we look at the number of elements there's in this case there's a little over a million elements which is sort of the other reason why we kind of don't recommend that you fix them because even the ones that are not good quality elements there's probably not that many of them relative to the fact that there are a million elements let's see so that is meshing we cover full classes and give you more information on how to decide that let's jump into the process settings how are we going to set this up and really before i go there i want to bring up one other thing this is a slide with way too many words you don't have to read all these but the point is we really want to understand what our question is what's the question why are you running this analysis this will help you determine a lot of different things and it will help you decide how you would even set up the analysis it might even help you decide how you mess your part again if someone wants a really quick answer i can give them a quick answer but i probably need a coarser mesh that will solve faster it will be slightly less accurate but solve much faster i'm comfortable doing that knowing that odds are later i'll come back there will be more specific questions i will solve it with more of a i guess just average mesh versus a coarse mesh and i know that i'll get you know great accuracy and good results at that point so really you know is it parking to fill are there going to be air traps is the cooling uniform all those things are good things to understand and to know up front so you can know what and how to solve your analysis when you set this up these are great questions doing them in the right order is helpful i've literally had somebody walk up to me hand me a part and say hey here's a part we're having issues can you tell us the best place to get it it's kind of like well i can with the software but really if you already have a part you already have a gate you already have a tool odds are you're not going to want to move the gate so maybe the question was something different you know or it was a great question it was just six months too late so let's look at this when we look at this we're going to start with what's the analysis sequence again we have a lot of different options we can do we can do fill fill pack we can do fill pack warp we can do cooling molding window gate location again what was the question maybe i can answer everything that was asked simply by a molding window that's a super fast analysis to run maybe it's not maybe i need to run a cool fem fill pack warp that's going to take me much longer to set up and much longer to solve so we're going to look at this the default is fill after we've set up whatever we're going to do we're then going to look at what material we're going to choose within mole flow within the database there are over 11 000 materials in the database and so obviously first thing i'm going to do i'm going to find the material that's going to be selected every once in a while you'll find one that isn't in the database for me i would contact the material supplier see if they have it and if they can send you that data so we're going to select a material then and then we need we do need a gate location then selected in order for us to solve something once we have at least those few things we can then look at other things that we're going to do and again depends on what analysis we're going to do in the first place one of the questions might be where should i put my gate if that's one of the questions i could come down here and say all right well we need to then actually look at running a gate location analysis once we do that we're going to have specific process settings for a gate location analysis there are different things we can do there are yeah a number of things we can do and set that up in order to help the have the software help us determine where the best place to put the gate is once we do have that in fact here's an example of that when we've run this and again a few criteria you can set up for that but then i can look at the results and say well where is the full resistance indicator so it's basically showing in order to minimize pressure my best gate location would be here the worst location to minimize pressure would be out on this side at least gives us a good idea as to where it would be does that mean i should run it right here well that's probably not likely a good location you'll need to talk to your tooling expert to say hey what do you think is reasonable if i see a result like this i would probably put it maybe in here but most likely sort of inside here to fill this again talk to your tooling guy have him help you to understand whether that's a good location or a bad location once we also run this if we look at our log file it will actually tell us the exact node location of where that would be so we could run it based on that exact node location or we could simply say great okay let me find something that's in this area that i believe to be more toolable and will go from there so once we have selected the gate location we can look at we could run a molding window analysis this is really going to help us understand what process settings i should use and again in this case if you know the process settings you're going to use or reasonably would be using you don't really need to run this then or if you talk to the process engineer hey tell me how you typically run this that would be another way to get this if we look at the results that have already been run here i can look at my zone plot i can see the various temperature based on injection time melt temperature and mold temperature if i look at my log it will give me three values specifically but i'm then going to actually take these with a grain of salt and kind of look at this to say well i see a large area here that's preferred i can examine this and kind of say well preferred fill time is somewhere 0.24 to about one so if my fill time is anywhere in that i'm probably going to be pretty reasonable if my melt temperature is somewhere mid-range and if my mold temperature is probably somewhere mid-range you know i might pick somewhere like this so maybe 0.4 seconds point something like that would be a good place to start my analysis from here then i can actually use that data come over to an analysis set it up that way and actually run it if we come back to this we can set up a fill pack warp we can come over here let's add a gate location put it there and we can look at our process settings so here's when we get our options right what is the surface temperature of our mold what is the melt temperature that will be coming out of the machine we can look at the first stage or the filling control we can do it via automatic the software does some stuff in the background to come up with a reasonable value or i can set an actual time we saw based on molding window 0.4 is a good place to be we can look at how we're setting up our vp switchover again it's that's the switchover point from first phase to second phase or to pressure controlled automatic will get us close i can also set a specific volume the value that i know most analysts use is somewhere from 95 to 99 most use 98 or 99. once we've switched into our pack control here we have options to set that for how long we pack and what percentage of our total injection pressure that we use or we could actually do pack time versus an exact pressure again with all of these there are multiple options that we can set and then of course we want to set our cool time which sort of rounds out our cycle time if we go to next we can look at any options we might have for a warpage analysis we can finish this and then at this point i can actually hit solve so i can start my analysis let's look amine cloud or local let's go ahead and start this one local and again this is all i haven't meshed it yet all i've done is imported my cad i've picked a gate location i've set some process settings and the other thing i can do before i actually solve this i can actually use something called fill preview for preview is you'll notice this is very fast if i go to my results i can look at my filling pattern this is the only thing you get out of fill preview you don't get anything else you don't get pressures you don't get weld lines you can see them based at kind of the location but this is kind of just a quick if i put a gate here how is my fill pattern going to move in a circular pattern out to fill my part i could then move this the fill preview will update and we can then see roughly where my fill pattern is going to be if i like that location i'm going to go ahead and actually start this and it'll start solving so while that is solving i do want to hop back here then to powerpoint and we can look at results right so first of all we'll cover this pretty quick here but there's different types of results a single data set is really something that's saying it's it's a snapshot in time so it's pressure at vp switchover right it's a snapshot in time intermediate results would be something like pressure that i could animate through time i could find probably the exact same picture i could find the same view in pressure that i could in pressure add vp switchover by animating and finding the right time step we also can look at intermediate profiled which is really looking at results through the thickness of the part i can also get x y plots i can look at highlights i can look at text files a lot of different types of results that do come out of mole flow when we're done solving based on the analysis sequence that we've set if we look at this holy moly look at all the different result types there are a lot and i've had people ask me this wow do i have to look at all these every time absolutely not it really comes down to well what was the question right what was the question that was asked when someone asked you to run the analysis based on that i'm going to sort of look at certain things if it's has to do with my part fill i'm going to look mostly at my flow results will you know what was the the time to fill it will show if it filled or shorted i can look at pressure i can look at temperatures i could look at the clamp force required air traps weld lines things like that if i've been asked to look at the cooling i could look at temperature of the mold i could look at the circuit flow rates did i achieve turbulence in the circuits or not if i'm looking at or the question was warpage i could look at my warp results to determine is it within the range or within the values i need it to be or not within each of my results to i can then modify and look at different results different plot properties to change the way that it's shown in order to really understand and to really see the way the results are displayed and there's two things i always look at first of all they need to be displayed for a way for for me to understand them and secondly a way for me to show someone else because i'm always showing someone else these results to make sure they understand them so while this is solving we actually see partial results going here so i can actually see at 0.2 seconds i'm 45 filled and this is my pressure and this is my clamp force so let's come back to this one again we have all these different results types there will be more i simply removed some of these so that it can be a little cleaner so let's turn our channels off get those out of the way i want to look at my fill time we can see here we can animate this one it will show us the filling pattern we'll see how these parts are going to fill the other thing that we will often see is if it short shots or not we could also look in the log file i mentioned the log file earlier that's where we started and that was what was populating on the one that's still running we can look at that and see if it will call out warnings if it's a short shot or not the first time i look at results i'm always looking at fill time and i'm usually animating this and letting this just kind of loop so i can see what's happening where i want to understand how is this part filling and i can always pause it and i can back it up and based on this i can see a lot of things you know what's happening on the bottom what's happening on the back in this case it looked like it was good from the top side but we'll notice also that this actually shorts because i see that it didn't actually fill so other things that i would look at i can look at the pressure does it exceed what my machine is capable of doing well if it is that's going to be a problem i can look at temperature flow front to see you know how much am i shearing my material a lot of different things i can look at let's see warp results i want to see how much does this part warp i can look at this i can take a look and see you know of these values how close is this now honestly before i look too far in this case because i got a short shot i need to solve that problem first before i really pay too much attention to my warp values but it's never a bad idea to kind of at least look and go at least gives me a ballpark early on where am i at with this i mentioned plot properties we can change plot properties to change the way that it's displayed i could change from shaded to a contour contour result on a fill pattern is going to give us a much better view of basically looking at hesitations or race tracking things like that okay we can animate this with 3d it's a little looks a little more different because it's not just a single contour line it's a contour surface for midplane or dual domain we get a true line but again because these are contour lines or contour surfaces anytime we see surfaces that are closer or these yeah these contour surfaces are closer to other ones if the other ones are spread further apart it's an equal time step between all of them so that's kind of the way we see acceleration or hesitation in our parts we notice as this is moving kind of through the bottom of the phone cover here it's moving here but boy that sure is slow right we see those we see those those contour surfaces stacking up pretty tight right that tells me boy we really have some hesitation here so you know those are the kind of things we can look at when we're looking at plot properties other things we can do we can change the number of contours that are there we can change the scaling i don't know that i would change the scale and fill time but maybe temperature we can look at that we can change scale maybe for the deflection results if we're looking at multiple results at one time hey here's version a here's version b let's show the results with warpage with the same scale that way it's sort of easier to understand and see which one has the last and which one has more based on color changes let's see so we can stop the animation of that we can take a peek back to see where is this right so even this already we're at 81 percent full so it's it's working its way along for sure when we look at our results one of the pretty slick things within mole flow is if you click f1 for the help which is a pretty standard way to get the help files for software it will not only bring up the help files but it brings you directly to the results that you have open and i've actually to be really honest i've found the results for moflow or the help files to be pretty helpful they tend to show a number of things they will give you sort of the generic you know description of what the result is but they also give you some other hints things to look for when you're looking at the result so that can also be very helpful as you're getting familiar with mold flow and the results that it gives you so if you have other questions we just brought up help files if you google moflow forums you'll find those you can contact technical support we have some awesome engineers that if you you know basically contact them easiest way is typically through the websport through accounts.autodesk.com you can set a time and they will call you and basically walk through whatever problem you're trying to work on so those guys do a great job as well the akn autodesk knowledge network you can go there there's a ton of information available out there multiple iq seminars have been put out for a number of years if you actually just google those you'll find those out there there is a youtube flow channel that's available that's got a ton of content out there sim hub events there are different events that occur events like autodesk university events like the mold flow summit or the manufacturing summit a lot of that content has been posted online and you can find that stuff out there this is the really quick version there is official moflow training there is insight fundamentals that is a three-day course advance flow is a two-day course and advanced colon warp is a three-day course those are available potentially either through autodesk or through our partner channel and those are the full training classes available for mold flow and really the last thing i want to leave you guys with here is the different technologies so we've focused on injection molding but i want to throw out a few others just so people are aware that they are available so while still injection molding there is chemical blowing agents you can do mucil meso core back gas assist compression injection compression we can do reactive materials so we can go into thermosets by injection microchip encapsulation even you know metal injection molding or powder injection molding other thermosets frozen transfer molding we can do conformal cooling versus just the standard cooling we can even do stuff for mole flow to helius or even api scripts basically getting mole flow to fea taking the data so the as manufacturer data out of mofo getting at your structural analysis to get you better more accurate results is also one of the really really cool things you can do with multiple results that is the only thing i have i guess at this point we will open it up to any questions that you have i do want to thank you for your time and attention here

Channel: Autodesk Advanced Manufacturing

Views: 9,102

Keywords: FeatureCAM, PowerMill, Machining, CNC, CAM, Manufacturing, Make Anything, Delcam, 3-axis, 5-axis, CADCAM software, CAM software, WeMAKE, Advanced Manufacturing, adv mfg, Moldflow, Autodesk

Id: XFN2EynTKbk

Length: 47min 17sec (2837 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 24 2020