Are you over or under engineering your plastic component?

Predicting the as-manufactured performance of injection molded plastic components is imperative to reducing design cycles and creating lightweight and efficient components. Design requirements such as stiffness and strength are typically simulated with implicit finite element methods, but the material properties and strengths are usually approximated or simplified. In reality, the manufacturing process has a very large influence on both the stiffness and strength of the plastic components. 

In this discussion, we will investigate the requirements for simulating the structural performance of assemblies of plastic components subjected to mechanical and thermal loading by looking at a real world component. We will include manufacturing induced properties from Autodesk Moldflow, such as fiber orientations and weld lines, to simulate the structural performance of a plastic assembly. We will investigate the anisotropy induced by spatially varying fiber orientation, material nonlinearity and rupture, and the effect of the manufacturing process on weld line strength.