Mechanical Design Evaluation & FEA

Designing with plastics

Smithers Rapra has a wealth of experience of designing products & component parts manufactured from rubbers plastics & other Polymer materials. Our consultants can advise on features that suit both materials & manufacture & can assist you in designing your product both in conceptual & aesthetic design.

Stress Analysis

An important part of the design process is to understand the behaviour of a component or assembly under load. Smithers Rapra provide a service to determine the stress levels & displacement in components using FEA techniques. Analysis can be combined with long-term material data & results from injection moulding simulations to give very accurate predictions to the performance of the part.

Typical examples include determining stresses around inserts & clips, stresses caused by assembly of distorted mouldings, thermal simulation to show resulting stresses from sterilisation cycles.

3D injection Moulding Simulation

Injection moulding simulation using 3D-Sigma software allows the filling of parts to be visualised in 3D. This process highlights issues that might occur at the point of moulding, examples include weld-lines, sink marks & & also provides the opportunity for local density to be assessed.

One of the key features of 3D injection moulding simulation is the high accuracy of the residual stress & distortion predictions. These results can be used to great effect in optimising an injection moulding tool to give quality parts with a high degree of dimensional accuracy.

For medical devices it is important to understand the effects of tool changes on the final part, especially when scaling up from single cavity prototype tools to multi-cavity production tooling.

3DSigma allows the export of simulation results to FEA for further analysis e.g. residual stress, temperature, fibre orientation & distortion.