Creating Thermoplastic Vents in Autodesk Moldflow Insight 2012

Issue

You want to know how to configure a venting analysis to simulate the existence of vents in your Autodesk Moldflow Insight thermoplastic analysis. This article will cover the procedure for setting up venting analyses.

Solution

Previous versions of Autodesk Moldflow Insight allowed the use of venting for thermoset analyses, and this has been expanded to thermoplastic analyses for the 2012 version.  This option is now available for 3D Thermoplastic Injection Molding, Thermoplastics Overmolding, Reactive Molding and Microchip Encapsulation when running Fill or Fill+Pack analyses.

The procedure below details how to setup the vent and the venting analysis to run properly.

1.  Ensure you have a 3D meshed model, and have chosen the appropriate analyses type and sequence.

2.  Choose “Boundary Conditions”  on the Molding Process Setup

3.  Choose Venting Locations

4.  Define the vent via Edit or create a new vent with New

5.  Change Vent Properties to Specified then name vent and choose Edit

6.  Specify the vent properties

7.  Select node(s) for vent placement

8.  Create "new" vent properties for each unique vent required

9.  When finished creating and assigning vents, right click and choose Finish Set Vent Analysis Locations

10. Configure other process settings

11. Enter Advanced Options within the process settings

12. Choose Edit for Solver Parameters and navigate to the Venting Analysis tab and select Perform Venting Analysis

13. Choose OK

Once the vents have been defined, and the analysis set up you can run the venting analysis.  As a note, you can configure a global vent setup within the process settings.  On step 5 above, it indicates to change to specified.  This is so each vent is unique.  Should you have multiple vents that are all the same size and exit pressure, you can set a global configuration seen in step 12 and in step 5 simply leave the option to “Use Global Settings”.  Either works, each specific to a certain configuration.