Moldmakers have developed step-by-step guidelines for taking a customer’s idea for a product through part shaping, preliminary plastics requirements, design considerations, layouts, checklists, and working and assembly drawings.
However, analysis is often limited to molding problems and solutions—flow balancing besides cavity layout and positioning—through collaboration with the customer, and hot manifold and resin suppliers; the size of tooling has never been truly scrutinized.
In actuality, the structural analysis of a tool or mold, a step to insert after design and prior to drafting for shop manufacturing, includes:
1) Testing the material from which to make a tool or mold.
2) Defining maximum permissible deformation and stress levels in areas of the tool or mold.
3) FEA model building, which combines the following sub-categories:
4) Geometry of tool or mold from CAD
5) Definition of a tooling material model
6) Mounting of the mold on a press
7) Tonnage and injection pressure during parts molding
8) Feedback from the field (practical or past experience remains important to guide numerical modeling, especially at the model building stage) and corelations to predictions, as a toolshop expands on such technology to tackle more advanced tooling concepts.
It sure was interesting when you said that FEA helps in structural mold analysis where the step involves geometry of tool or mold from CAD. This is something that must be considered by the manufacturing industry in order to reduce the number of physical prototypes and experiments. I could imagine how companies should consider FEA services to ensure smooth manufacturing services.