SOLIDWORKS 2022 What’s New – Plastics Materials Database

What would an annual release of SOLIDWORKS Plastics be without changes to the material database?  I think the best word would be unexpected.  Resin suppliers create new and improved grades of plastic resins for Designers and Engineers to use for manufacturing amazing products every year.  As such, the SOLIDWORKS Plastics material database needs to be updated often with what is and is not available for commercial injection molding use.  With SOLIDWORKS Plastics 2022, the material data we utilize for our plastic injection molding analysis has, of course, been updated to keep pace with the times.

I first wrote about SOLIDWORKS Plastics material changes in the blog SOLIDWORKS Plastics SP3 Additions and Improvements over two years ago.  One of the main additions at that time was improvements to material properties, specifically temperature dependent material properties for specific heat and thermal conductivity.  For SOLIDWORKS Plastics 2022, the material database improvements are more materials and better data to improve the quality of our analysis work.  If you read the What’s New documentation, there have been 112 materials added and 76 materials removed from the SOLIDWORKS Plastics 2022 database.  Another change for the material database is that over 1100 resins received updates to PVT (Pressure-Volume-Temperature) material data.  That change may be more significant than added materials.

If you are not familiar with adding a material in SOLIDWORKS Plastics, you can find it by looking at the Injection Unit Settings Property Manager once you have created a new SOLIDWORKS Plastics project.  Right-click on the injection unit, then select Settings, followed by a left-click on the material button to open the material database.  As you scroll through the different material families and trade names, click on the PVT tab to verify if the material has a constant density or temperature dependent density data.  If a resin has constant density, the chart on the PVT tab will look like Figure 1.

Figure 1.

While a SOLIDWORKS Plastics project will solve the FILL analysis correctly, the results from a PACK or WARP solve will not be correct.  The most likely scenario for results for a constant density material would first appear in the estimate of sink marks when reviewing the results from a FILL analysis.  In Figure 2, the constant density material exhibits zero sink everywhere on the filled plastic part.  For all practical purposes with plastic injection molding that is impossible.

Figure 2.

If you are using a version of SOLIDWORKS Plastics from several years ago, constant density materials could be found with a bit of manual searching, clicking through several resin families and material grades.  With SOLIDWORKS Plastics 2022, finding a constant density material is no longer the norm.  What you will find with most of the resins in the database can be seen in Figure 3, a temperature dependent density chart for PVT data.

Figure 3.

Having the correct Pressure-Volume-Temperature data of a plastic resin allows the sink mark estimate for a FILL analysis to generate results that indicate regions where sink may be a concern (Figure 4).

Figure 4.

I think we can expect to see the SOLIDWORKS Plastics material database continue to evolve with each new software release.  When the updates improve the accuracy of our analysis results, that is even better!  I hope you are looking forward to utilizing the new resins and new material data with SOLIDWORKS Plastics as much as I am.  Now go make your products better with SOLIDWORKS Simulation!

I hope this part of the What’s New series gives you a better understanding of the new features and functions of SOLIDWORKS 2022.  Please check back to the CATI Blog as the CATI Application Engineers will continue to break down many of the new items in SOLIDWORKS 2022.  All these articles will be stored in the category of “SOLIDWORKS What’s New.”

Bill Reuss
Senior Simulation Product Specialist
Computer Aided Technology

DESIGN INNOVATION MONTH 2021 – Webinars, Virtual Showroom, Contests
Design Innovation Month is CATI’s massive “What’s New in 2022” event for SOLIDWORKS, 3DEXPERIENCE, and 3D printing & 3D scanning technology.  That’s six weeks of live and on-demand webinars, demonstrations, in-depth blog posts, and prizes!  Best of all, it’s free of charge!  Check the DI Month Hub for all the details and to sign up for your next event.