Altair Manufacturing Solver 2021 Release Notes

Altair Manufacturing Solver is a state-of-the-art solver suite for manufacturing applications built on a parallel, modular, and extensible framework that is suitable for simulations of manufacturing processes. The current version of Manufacturing Solver includes casting and welding solution modules.

New Features

Altair Compute Console
With this release, a new utility is included called Altair Compute Console (ACC). It replaces individual menu entries for a group of Altair solvers (including OptiStruct, Radioss, MotionSolve, AcuSolve, HyperXtrude and several more). It is the easiest way to launch a solver on a local host or submit simple job to a remote Linux server/cluster or PBS system. It includes an interactive GUI for selecting input files, defining run options, submit multiple solver runs using a queue, schedule a delay, monitor solution progress, kill/pause a job, and provides easy way to execute Fluid-Structure Interaction (FSI) solution sequence for AcuSolve with OptiStruct and MotionSolve.

Metal Casting

New Features

Clamping Force Calculations
The solver now computes the required clamping force based on the packing pressure and the mold opening direction.

Enhancements

Option to Modify Air Properties
You can modify the air properties and this data will be used for the air region in the vicinity of the flow front. This can help improve convergence under some circumstances.
Advanced Solution Options for the Filling Solver
You can now specify advanced numerical simulation options to control the filling solver. These include the following options:
  • The mass matrix used in transient numerical formulation can be either a full matrix or a lumped matrix
  • The transient numerical scheme can be a first or second-order scheme
  • The flow condition on the wall can be a full slip or a no-slip (full stick) condition
Constant Time Step in Filling Analysis
The filling of a mold is a transient process and the solver uses an automatic time step option. In addition, now you can choose a constant time step option. In some cases, this can greatly reduce the computational time.
Improvement to Temperature Computations in Mold
A new numerical integration scheme that eliminates/minimizes the numerical oscillations in the mold is implemented. This especially improves the solution in low conductivity molds (such as sand molds) and also when the mesh is coarse.

Resolved Issues

Solid Fraction Initialization
Resolved an issue where, in multiple cycle analysis, the solid fraction was not correctly initialized between cycles.

Injection Molding

New Features

Mold and Part Insert Stress Analysis Using OptiStruct
The injection forces during the molding process can deform/deflect the mold assembly and the part inserts in the model. The solver has implemented a one-way coupling with Optistruct to compute stress analysis using the forces and temperature computed during the molding process. The solver automatically creates a runnable OptiStruct deck to do an elastic analysis. You can import these decks in HyperMesh or SimLab to further enhance this and do more advanced analysis.
Cooling Solution in the Fast Solver
A fast 3D solver for the filling phase of injection molding is introduced in the previous release. Now, this fast solution is extended to the cooling phase. This solver's computational speed is comparable to midplane analysis and now supports both the filling and cooling stages of the solution. This is a major enhancement and enables a solution in a few minutes for these two stages. This fast solver does not support the packing stage, fiber orientation analysis, and models with mold

Enhancements

Valve Controller using Sensor Coordinates
The valve controller BC now supports sensor location using XYZ coordinates. This will enable specification of the sensor location based on its actual location and internally the solver will use the value in the nearest node.
Speedup of Packing Computations
The solver has many internal parameters to control data that affect the numerical convergence and in turn the computation time. These parameters are adjusted to reduce the computational time without compromising on the solution accuracy.
Fiber Orientation Analysis - Fiber Interaction
Fiber orientation analysis is enhanced by adding fiber-fiber interaction. This will increase the accuracy of the predicted fiber orientation tensor.
Improvements to Output Data
The output CSV file with filling statistics is enhanced to include the percentage filled in each cavity of a multi-cavity mold and also the injection pressure in every injection BC face. In addition, the expected fill time is also printed in the output file.

Resolved Issues

Fiber Orientation Analysis - Fiber Starvation
Resolved an issue where, due to numerical reasons and near-wall conditions, there was fiber starvation in some regions near the walls.
Valve Controller - Sensor Nodes in Unfilled Region
The solver was considering the data from a sensor irrespective of whether it is in a filled region or not. This issue is resolved now and the solver will consider only the filled regions.
Clamp Force Computation - Unfilled Regions
The solver was considering the entire domain to compute the clamping force. This issue is resolved now and the solver will consider only the filled regions for this computation.