Numerical simulation of manufacturing processes helps manufacturing companies and their supply chain by giving them a competitive advantage and keeping the costs low. Altair has a suite of solutions for the most commonly used manufacturing processes on its easy-to-use Inspire platform. We actively collaborate with industries in different regions to improve the accuracy and usability of each one of these solutions. This presentation has two parts. First, an overview of the suite of manufacturing solutions is presented. It is followed by a dive deep into a novel method used for predicting the fiber orientation tensor in short fiber-reinforced injection molded parts.

Short fiber reinforced injection molded parts are finding an increasing role in structural applications as a cost-effective alternative for metal and other composite parts. Warpage analysis of these parts after the ejection from the mold and the strength analysis require multiscale modeling of the polymer matrix with the reinforcing fibers. To predict the material behavior accurately, injection molding analysis needs to predict the distribution of the fiber orientation in the part. The standard way to determine the distribution of the fiber orientation tensor is to solve the standard Folgar-Tucker equations. In our injection molding solution, a new approach using DEM is used to predict the fiber orientation tensor. This is then integrated with our multiscale designer to perform stress analysis of injection molded parts. This talk will conclude with a glimpse of ongoing ML studies in manufacturing simulation.