Thermoformed Product Prototyping & Die Design
Polyflow accelerates design while shrinking energy and raw material demands to make your manufacturing processes more cost-effective and environmentally sustainable. R&D teams use this technology extensively to design and optimize processes such as extrusion, thermoforming, blow molding, glass forming, fiber drawing and concrete shaping. Design engineers use Polyflow to minimize physical prototyping when manufacturing extrusion dies or to reduce thickness variation to improve the quality of thermoformed or blown products.
Polyflow’s unique inverse die design capability can identify final die designs much faster than traditional build-and-test methods. This translates into substantial cost reduction and time savings. Your team can improve the quality of blown and thermoformed products by running trial-and-error processes with ANSYS Polyflow, rather than testing changes on the production line. Glass forming and float glass engineering simulations help designers to more quickly produce higher-quality tableware, glass containers and flat glass.
Now core Polyflow capabilities are also included in ANSYS AIM, the easy-to-use simulation environment designed for all engineers. You can use AIM's guided workflows to model the deformation of molten plastic pushed through an extrusion die. AIM is ideal for simulating the flow within the die, predicting the extrudate shape for a particular die and predicting the required die shape in order to obtain a desired extrudate shape.
Capabilities
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Develop Better Packaging
Polyflow models your manufacturing process so you can take corrective action quickly and early in the process to cost-effectively design better, lighter packaging.
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Reduce Extrusion Die Costs
Fine-tune your extrusion dies using PolyFlow to reduce the number of design iterations by 50 percent or more, saving resources and accelerating turnaround time.
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Investigate Diverse Materials with Digital Material Laboratory Models
Polyflow includes a vast library of mathematical material models that aid in simulating materials so you can understand and accurately characterize material behavior.
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Account for Nonlinear Thermal Effects, Including Radiation
Polyflow includes models for advanced nonlinear material properties and radiation prediction for the most accurate simulation results.
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Fluid-Structure Interaction
Native fluid–structure interaction (FSI) models thermomechanical interactions between flowing materials and surrounding solids in a fully coupled approach.
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Optimization and Design Exploration
Use Polyflow’s built-in optimization algorithm to automatically minimize or maximize a given objective function based on input parameters.
See how our customers are using our software:

Cutting Extrusion Die Design Costs
By reducing the number of trial-and-error prototypes, simulation can save hundreds of thousands of dollars annually in designing PVC extrusion dies.
View Case Study

Reducing Material Costs
R&D reduced material costs for a water container by 10 percent while maintaining product integrity.
View Case Study

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