SolidWorks® Plastics

SolidWorks Plastics Professional - For Plastic Part Designers

Part designers get rapid feedback on how modifications to wall thickness, gate locations, materials, or geometry can affect the manufacturing of their part:

• CAD Integrated: fully embedded in the SolidWorks environment so you can analyze and modify designs for manufacturability at the same time you optimize for form, fit, and function.
• Easy to Learn and Use: takes only minutes to learn and does not require extensive analysis or plastics expertise.
• Facilitates Design Team Communication: web-based HTML reports make it fast and easy to communicate simulation results and design advice to all members of the design-to -manufacturing team.

Analyze and optimize a range of geometries including thin-walled plastic parts

SolidWorks Plastics Premium - For Mold Designers and Mold Makers

Mold designers can quickly create and analyze single, multi-cavity, and family mold layouts, including sprues, runners, and gates. You can even balance runner systems and estimate cycle time, clamp tonnage, and shot size:

• Avoid Costly Mold Rework: SolidWorks Plastics helps ensure molds will work right the first time to avoid multiple rounds of time-consuming, costly, and unnecessary rework.
• Optimize Feed System Design: analyze sprues, runners, and gates to balance runner systems; optimize gate type, size, and location; determine the best runner layout, size, and cross-sectional shape.
• Estimate Cycle Time, Clamp Tonnage, and Shot Size: enables mold designers and mold makers to quote tooling projects quickly and accurately; assists manufacturing teams to size the injection molding machine for a given mold, optimize injection molding cycle time, and reduce plastics material scrap.

Automatically balance the runner systems of family molds and avoid manufacturing problems.

SolidWorks Plastics simulates how melted plastic flows during the injection molding process to predict defects on your parts. Once defects are identified, they can be easily minimized or eliminated by making changes to the part design, mold design, plastics material, or processing parameters, to save energy, natural resources, time, and money.

Intuitive Workflow and Design Advice

SolidWorks Plastics works directly on your 3D model, so there are no translation issues. You can make changes to your model and see the impact right away. The state-of the-art meshing system is powerful and fast, and covers a range of geometries, from thin-walled parts to very thick and solid parts.

An intuitive user interface leads you step by step. Guided analysis setup, intelligent defaults, and automated processes ensure that simulations are set up correctly, even if you rarely use simulation tools. The SolidWorks Plastics material database contains approximately 5,000 grades of commercial plastics and it is fully customizable for proprietary or custom materials.

Analyze thick and chunky parts that are solid in nature.