Software Tightens Links to Provide Smooth Interface Between Manufacturing and Mechanical Modeling


ANSYS, Inc. (NASDAQ: ANSS), a global innovator of simulation software and technologies designed to optimize product development processes, today announced the release of ANSYS(R) POLYFLOW(R) 3.12 software for analysis of plastic and rubber processing, glass forming, and food processing. This new version of ANSYS POLYFLOW technology is faster, more efficient and can handle larger problems than previous releases, since it includes several new solvers and modeling features tailored for specific applications. Newly built-in is the ability to provide data to structural analysis software from ANSYS, which improves the accuracy of virtual prototyping predictions.

ANSYS POLYFLOW software is particularly well known for its capability in modeling viscoelastic materials, which include many plastics, rubber, pastes and dough. These materials exhibit behaviors in between those of fluids and solids and are, therefore, difficult to simulate. Applications for which ANSYS POLYFLOW software is commonly used include blow molding for manufacturing plastic bottles; thermoforming for optimizing medical and food packaging; extrusion and inverse die design for developing rubber seals; and glass forming for designing tableware.

"The improved depth of ANSYS POLYFLOW means that users can now apply the software to more design problems," said Chris Reid, vice president, marketing at ANSYS, Inc. "And the release addresses two important demands from our industrial users: running much larger simulations faster and with less memory than ever before, and completing the manufacturing simulation model by virtual testing with structural analysis software."

The addition of three efficient and robust solvers -- fully coupled, multifrontal and iterative -- means users can run simulations on much larger meshes than ever before. For example, 3-D simulations for dies containing more than 3 million elements have been converged on a standard high-end computer in just a few hours. Significant speed-ups regularly exceed 100 percent on large simulations compared to previous releases of ANSYS POLYFLOW software.

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