Partner Products & Creo 1.0: Ban flimsy cheap plastic parts with Simpoe

By Geoff Hedges | Published: May 23, 2011

 

 

Car dashboards that bend under your finger tips. Children’s toys with ugly merge lines. Electronic housings that look old within a couple weeks. Sure, plastics can be economical, but do they have to look nasty and cut-rate?

 

No. With great design software and great simulation software, engineers get more from plastics. Good software alerts engineers to design and manufacturing problems. Address the issues and you’ll create high-value products. Ignore them, and hello dollar store.

Simpoe knows the value of detecting these problems more than anyone. This PTC gold tier partner for Creo 1.0 specializes in easy-to-use, easy-to-learn, and affordable software solutions to simulate the plastic injection manufacturing process. Integrated in Creo 1.0, SimpoePro helps users check the design and the tooling of their plastic parts, and minimize manufacturing costs, without ever leaving the Creo environment.

Thierry Leroy, Chief Operating Officer at SIMPOE

I asked Thierry Leroy, Chief Operating Officer at SIMPOE, to tell us more about his flagship product, how it’s integrated with Creo 1.0, and how engineers use it to create quality plastic parts.

GH: What is SimpoePro?

Leroy: SimpoePro is the only complete plastic injection simulation solution fully embedded into Creo 1.0. Users can identify early in the design stage potential manufacturing problems, study alternative solutions, and directly assess the impact of modifying the parts or manufacturing process, always in the Creo environment. The seamless integration of SimpoePro with Creo really “closes the loop” of plastic part design and manufacturing optimization, whatever the complexity and geometry of such parts, whatever their size, and whether they include metal inserts or not.

GH: Why should companies consider using SimpoePro?

Leroy:  Some of the reasons you mentioned in your introduction, to identify issues with the potential quality of the parts. This is what’d say is the full list:

• Identify and resolve issues early, before any prototyping.

• Simulate part filling, including visualization of the melt front, weld lines, air traps, temperature and pressure distributions, shear effects, clamping forces, etc.

With additional modules, users can simulate specialized applications like:

• The packing phase, residual constraints, sink marks locations. Plus you can optimize cycle time by balancing each of these aspects virtually, rather than creating physical prototypes.
• Thermal regulation during the injection process, so, tooling engineers can optimize the mold cooling system.
• Part deformation after mold opening. Deformations can be visualized in either direction, or globally, and the effects of residual and thermal constraints displayed separately. Users can even export the counter-deformed geometry, to optimize the mold design.

SimpoePro Lightning Animation

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GH: I remember the old days of simulation where you had to export model files to another application, run the analysis, and then try to interpret how the results would impact the original model. What’s the process today?

Leroy: SimpoePro runs inside Creo 1.0, so it makes it easy to use, as you have the design tool and simulation capabilities within one app. As soon as you see the results, you can further optimize the design  and reapply the simulation. It’s fast and user friendly, so you no longer need to be a simulation expert to run the simulation and interpret the results.

GH: What Creo apps does  SimpoePro integrate with?

Leroy:  SimpoePro runs inside Creo Parametric. It makes it easy to use, as you have the design tool and simulation capabilities within one app.

GH: Where can users find out more about SimpoePro?

Leroy: From our website.There’s a lot of  information, how to, examples, etc. You can also request a free light version called SimpoeXpress to try it for yourself.