Thin Shell Modelling of Plastic Parts

Thickness Attribution in MSC Apex

The walls of injection moulded parts are often of a non-uniform thickness as a result of draft angle effects and even by design in the case of optical lenses.  Accurately capturing this in a thin shell model can be difficult and time consuming so is often either ignored or over simplified.

The thickness attribution tool in MSC Apex is able to rapidly extrapolate from a mid-plane mesh to calculate the variable thickness of the part, producing an FEA model that accurately reflects your geometry.

This short video shows an example based on an optical lens.

MSC Apex is available under the MSC One token licensing system.  It has many powerful tools for de-featuring geometry, extracting mid-planes and meshing in addition to the capability shown here. 

A single license of this could cost you just under £2400 per year.  How many hours of geometry clean up and meshing would you need to save in order to justify that cost? Please get in touch if you’d like to have a trial of this powerful new tool.