Moldflow Announces the Release of Moldflow Plastics Insight 6.1

MPI 6.1 delivers new technologies and key enhancements to help users investigate and solve potential design issues, better interface with structural CAE software programs, reduce solution time, and work more efficiently.

25/11/2006 Moldflow Corporation, the leading provider of design through manufacturing solutions for the plastics injection molding industry, today announced the release of Moldflow Plastics Insight (MPI) 6.1, the industry’s most powerful and widely used plastics design analysis software.

MPI 6.1 delivers new technologies and key enhancements to help users investigate and solve potential design issues, better interface with structural CAE software programs, reduce solution time, and work more efficiently.

One of the most significant new features in MPI 6.1 is the ability to predict birefringence (also known as double refraction), which is a phenomenon that causes optical defects in lens applications. This will allow designers of optical parts to be able to eliminate one of the major causes of lens defects in applications ranging from automotive lighting to magnifying glasses used to inspect medical x-rays to display screens on cell phones.

Enhanced 3D ANSYS and 3D ABAQUS interfaces now support the export of 3D Overmolding, 2-shot Sequential Overmolding, and Microchip Encapsulation models. The 3D ANSYS interface also enables the export of a 2-layer, aggregated 3D mesh with results, which vastly improves the efficiency of structural analyses completed in ANSYS. MPI 6.1 offers new customer-driven interfaces to Nastran and Patran for the export of key plastics material data and analysis results, thereby improving the accuracy of subsequent stress analyses.

MPI 6.1 features a parallel solution method on shared memory multi-processor (SMP) systems, which speeds up 3D Warp analyses by a factor of 1.3 or more. An AMG matrix solver option cuts solution time for large models when running a Midplane, Fusion Warp, or a 3D Flow analysis.

Murali Annareddy, Director of Product Marketing at Moldflow, states, “The prediction of birefringence in MPI 6.1 is a breakthrough capability. Weight and safety considerations are a driving trend in the automotive and electronics industries towards replacing glass with plastics. Creating optical quality plastics can be difficult due to the freedom of shape that plastics provide and the complexity added by the manufacturing process. The prediction of birefringence will help to address and reduce these effects during the design phase.”

Also new in MPI 6.1 is the MPI/Enterprise Edition, which offers greater implementation flexibility and provides more users access to MPI. MPI/Enterprise Edition is targeted for organizations with multiple users and/or sites dispersed over a wide geographic region. Annareddy added, “The MPI/Enterprise Edition will help our largest customers deploy our technology more completely throughout their organizations.”