Investing in digitization means investing for success, and the plastic industry needs powerful tools for the development process and beyond. Altair’s broad, powerful technology portfolio enables sustainable product design, helps organizations transform the plastics value chain, and meet the industry’s sustainability and climate protection goals. It also helps organizations:

• Substitute materials
• Increase recycled material usage rates
• Assess and reduce carbon footprint

The final material is "made" during the manufacturing, so are the final properties and all variations of them. Altair’s integrated simulation-driven design approach starts with the injection molding of the plastic component to improve the prediction of its mechanical performance. Using a modern injection molding simulation as a basis, the anisotropic fiber orientation distribution at each point of the component are transferred to the corresponding areas in the mechanical component. This is provided by a new description of the material which takes the properties typical of the plastic into account in the mechanical analysis including:

• Anisotropy
• Non-linearity
• Strain rate dependence
• Tension-compression asymmetry
• Failure performance
• Dependence on temperature

Plastic components behave very different when they are compressed or tensioned. Properties are nonlinear elastic, load-rate dependent, cyclic loading can cause heating and softening. The same applies for loads along and perpendicular to the fiber direction: plastic fails in terms of anisotropy. These effects require a special modelling of the failure tailored to the plastic.

Fatigue prediction for plastic parts is also crucial in the design process and must consider factors including local component strength, multiaxiality, aging, condition, temperature, and load duration. S-Life Plastics by PART Engineering conducts a short-term, long-term, and fatigue strength assessment for plastic components.

Altair GmbH is the official software supplier to Computer Aided Material Preselection by Uniform Standards (CAMPUS), the world’s most successful plastic material database adhering to rigorous international standards

CAMPUS is the only database which exclusively offers truly comparable material data measured according to binding international standards. It offers valuable material data, including single point values for all relevant categories and extensive multipoint data (curves) with engineering data, chemical resistance and aging properties, powerful search and compare features, and datasheet print functions in ten languages.

CAMPUS is a registered trademark of Chemie Wirtschaftsförderungsgesellschaft mbH (CWFG), Frankfurt/Main.