Design plastic parts according to business rules

Functional Plastic Part is a CATIA application that allows you to design easily robust and complex plastic model. This application has been developed for the specific industry of plastic, based on Plastic Designer’s knowledge.

Functional Plastic Parts

A plastic part is molded and you start off by designing two surfaces: the core (mold’s imprint) and the cavity (mold’s shell). These two surfaces are necessary to begin the design of your part.

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This application uses functional features. It allows you to add in only one feature a drafted pad with fillets that will be intersected by the core or the cavity.

For instance you can create a rib that pass through the part that will be cut by the cavity frontier.

It is possible to define manufacturability properties for your 3D model (constant thickness, parting element, pulling direction and draft angle).

The functional body representation contains only functional features (inside a functional set). These features are independent of the specification tree’s history. When you apply a feature at the beginning of your design, the feature is constantly interacting with the topology’s model.

What are the key benefits for you using Functional Plastic Part?

Features based on plastic design rules increases flexiblity and manufacturability.

The association of Part Design features and Boolean operations allows you to create several simple features at the same time, improving design phase efficiency.

Due to the independency between features, the robustness of the 3D model is highly improved.

In this video you will see how to design a honeycomb rib into a plastic cavity. The honeycomb sketch comes from a “.dxf” file (uploaded on an open source library). The rib functionality allows you to create pad with fillet and draft in only one feature.

Simulate the plastic injection filling through a 3D model After creating the plastic part, you can simulate the plastic injection filling process with the SIMULIA application: Plastic Part Filling. It is best practice to review your part before produce it. Verify that the design respects the business rules: constant thickness, no welding lines, no air trap, frozen areas, etc. This application give you a consistent simulation material library (4000 different plastics types). These materials, based on worldwide plastic suppliers’ data, contain basically all the properties you need to simulate the injection (density, viscosity, glass transition temperature, etc.) which you can easily modify manually if needed. In addition, you can simulate several injection points. You also benefit from an accurate finite elements modeling. Before starting the simulation, you can set up the plastic injection data that come from the injection molding machine (pressure, temperature and speed). This video illustrates the different results you obtain after simulating the plastic injection filling through a 3D model. After adding the injection points, the material and then mesh, you can simulate and observe the different outputs such as the fill time, the temperature, the pressure, the welding lines, etc. If you are interested to watch more about 3DExperience, please take a look at our PLM Technology YouTube Channel.If you are interested to watch more about 3DExperience, please take a look at our PLM Technology YouTube Channel.If you are interested to watch more about 3DExperience, please take a look at our PLM Technology YouTube Channel.

If you are interested to watch more about 3DExperience, please take a look at our PLM Technology YouTube Channel.