How to choose the right material, the right design, and the right process to develop solutions that minimize carbon emissions and bolster your bottom line.

A step-by-step guide for transforming your plastics engineering value chain to develop solutions that optimize performance, minimize carbon emissions, and gain a competitive edge.

What you will learn:

• Material selection and testing to minimize carbon emissions with Global Warming Potential evaluations alongside traditional performance and cost metrics
• A step-by-step simulation-driven approach to accelerate design space creation, explore variants, and better optimize lightweight plastic parts
• Ways to predict and prevent critical problems such as injection mold core fractures or failures to optimize production operations
• Improve manufacturability using multiscale material modeling
• How to gain a competitive edge with faster time to market through first-time-right injection molding methods, simulation and rapid variant analyses to optimize part, mold and parameters for manufacturing

When it comes to plastics, the topic of sustainability is increasingly coming into focus in the industry. The packaging solutions and recycling specialist ALPLA Group, an Austrian company operating internationally has set itself high standards in this regard. To achieve its goals, the company relies on virtual product design to drive its development, with Altair’s adaptive simulation solutions playing a vital role. This article features an actual customer solution to demonstrate the value of simulation and provides an outlook on ALPLA’s future virtual product development strategy, within which the democratization of simulation is particularly important.

Sika is a specialty chemicals company, and a leader in developing and producing systems and products for bonding, sealing, damping, reinforcing, and protecting in the building sector and automotive industry. Offering a wide range of BIW noise reduction and vibration damping solutions and addressing problems encountered in automotive development, Sika is a key development partner for OEMs and suppliers. Sika’s structural systems team focuses on solutions reinforcing the customer’s BIW and NVH issues.

Using the Altair design space workflow, Sika engineers eliminated time-consuming steps in their workflow. This let them make faster decisions - instead of hours in the prior standard workflow, it now only takes minutes. Modeling time was reduced by 70%, giving the team to spend more time gaining a deeper knowledge of the part and its improvement.

Sika won the 2018 Altair Enlighten Award with its ultra-lightweight constrained layer material composite for structure-borne noise reduction.

Altair solutions enable X-Plast to improve a structural part for Knorr-Bremse Rail Systems. Owing to its low environmental impact, rail is one of the most sustainable means of transportation. To ensure a safe and reliable operation of railway components for more than 30 years these parts have to be strong and durable to meet the many requirements. They must withstand extreme temperature and climate conditions, as well as vibrations and high mechanical loads, even impact from stones.