Plastics / Product Development / Production

More and more products are conquering the markets. Many times only the material innovations or optimized materials offer the possibility of enhancements or new developments. Due to the fact that the component costs, the design, the manufacturing options and the lifespan of a component is influenced to a large extent by the material selection it is important that the material selection is already secured in the early product development phase. Using the simulation programs that are currently available a large number of required product characteristics can already be calculated in advance and the duration of the development process can be reduced considerably.

Increasing the technical and economic product performance

The reason for material optimization is either to increase the technical performance of a product or to reduce the costs. Typical tasks we process in the plastics simulation center in this process include the inspection of the flow behavior of various materials and the creation of optimized component and tool designs or the inspection of the component rigidity and strength. A redesign of the component geometry is frequently successful when making the decision in favor of a material due to the complexity of the development process - of course this only applies if the constraints permit it (e.g. installation space specifications, fitting dimensions etc.). The use of new materials has increasingly been adopted in the past few years when it has been a matter of developing lighter components. Lower density plastics with lighter filling materials are, for instance, available to this end.

Calculation of plastics and metals

Plastics are suitable in a lot of cases as a substitute for metals and offer a number of advantages at the same time, in particular a lower mass, better heat insulation and lower levels of sound generation. Metals on the other hand are in particular demand when it is a matter of withstanding high temperature stresses or absorbing high deformation stress for instance in a crash case. Sometimes combined metal - plastic components are the right choice for a successful product, as is the case with frontends in which a very thin walled, bearing metal plate has the most diverse plastic elements and a plastic ribbing moulded onto it. Impetus selects the right material with you and calculates both the plastic and also the metal components.

Plastics simulation center

We perform the entire material selection, secure the requirements with precisely adapted simulation models and advise you concerning material questions in the course of new product developments or variants. The staff at Impetus Plastics Engineering have the necessary experience, the plastics expertise and longtime connections with a lot of raw materials suppliers to this end. The Plastics Simulation Centre can provide you with a comprehensive range of services. These include:

• Generation of a requirements specification taking technical and economic aspects into account
• Implementation of requirements in existing or measurable material coefficients, researching and measurement of material coefficients, component tests
• Injection moulding simulation to select and secure the material
• Plastic-harmonized dimensioning with media, temperature and time-dependent material coefficients
• Mechanical FEM calculations e.g. securing the reduction of weight or minimize the wall thicknesses
• Clarification of damage events

As a specialist for the simulation of injection moulding processes and component stresses Impetus Plastics Engineering has so far demonstrated its expertise in hundreds of projects. The calculation of component variants, FEM simulations of load conditions, deformation situations and failure modes, structural analyses of glass fibre reinforced injection moulded parts as well as anisotropy tests can be found in the service portfolio.