All businesses strive to increase efficiency and lower costs. If your business fails to innovate, your products will be surpassed by others that do. Imagine that your latest product design achieves higher efficiency in a smaller package but, when you bring it to your tooling supplier, you learn that it will take considerable cost and time to validate the tooling you need. What will you do? The tooling manufacturer has limitations in its manufacturing processes that limit your options to get a better product to market faster. If only it had access to the leading simulation software and the latest advances in additive manufacturing technology, the supplier would be able to solve this problem instead of forcing you to take measures into your own hands.
Senior Flexonics experienced this. The result? Leveraging additive manufacturing, engineers quickly and accurately created the die they designed and tested it using ANSYS structural simulation software, in only 25 percent of the time and with 95 percent cost savings.
Senior Flexonics is developing the next generation of compact liquid/air heat exchangers for multiple industrial and mobile applications, such as exhaust gas recirculators (EGRs) and piston-cooling jets for heavy-duty trucks. The latest designs increase heat conduction between the hot and cold fluids, and are smaller and lighter than current coolers. These heat exchangers require stainless steel fins that push the flexibility limits of the material. The design is so close to the material limits that the die supplier indicated that the company would not be able to produce a die that could make the fins without tearing the steel. It would at least require some trial and error (and lots of money) to get to a die that would work for this process.
Using ANSYS LS-DYNA, Senior Flexonics engineers not only designed a die that would work and avoid distortion in areas of the fins, but also simulated the rolling of the fins into the final cylinder form to ensure a reliable final product.
To learn more about Senior Flexonics’ innovation, read the article Simulation and Additive Manufacturing Speed Tooling Design in the recent issue of ANSYS Advantage magazine.
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