The AU Factory Experience: Are Your Plastic Parts Production Ready

JACOB WEINSTOCK: Hello everyone and welcome to this recording of our AU class. The AU class is called The AU Factory Experience-- Are Your Plastic Parts Production Ready? My name is Jacob and I'm a customer advocacy manager for Fusion 360. And my co-host is Tim.

TIM VANAST: Hey, Jacob. Thank you. Again, my name is Tim and I'm an implementation consultant. My background is a long history of plastics manufacturing.

JACOB WEINSTOCK: So before we start, here's the safe harbor statement. Cool. So the agenda today is going to revolve around two key themes. The first one is educate. So we're going to hopefully educate you a bit with injection molding, some of the process, what you need to consider when injection molding. We're then going to talk about Fusion 360 and some of the tools available in Fusion 360 to design and make your plastic parts. And then finally, move on to Moldflow for some more advanced simulation.

And we're going to demonstrate this through real world problems that we face. So with the Factory this year, we're designing a really cool keypad. And a few of those components on that keypad are injection molded. So we're going to show you similar problems we faced during the design and manufacture of this and some of the ways we overcame them.

Yeah, so the factory experience has been going a few years now. We've actually had eight live and virtual events, really popular. People get to get hands on making things-- electronics, metal, plastic, all different types of manufacturing processes. So we've had more than 4,000 attendees, 3,000 devices assembled, and hopefully a lot more this year. So if you're at AU, please come and visit us. I'm sure we'll answer any questions you have.

TIM VANAST: So injection molded parts are really-- they're all over the place. We see them every day. Here is the example of the keypad that we are making at the Factory this year. But really, plastics kind of are right there. They're throughout our whole life, whether it's work or it's play. And they're really great for designing high quality parts for medium to high production levels. So we really want to talk about that. If you're designing a part and you're going to have high quantities produced, injection molding is a good way to do it. But we want to make sure we do it in the right ways.

So we want to start out with the injection molding machine here a second. On the right side, we've got the injection unit. On the left, we have the clamping unit. And that's really all intended to hold the mold in place in the middle between them. So just as a basic fundamentals for everyone here, we're going to put the pellets in the top there into the hopper. And those are going to be melted by some shear-- some mechanical shear as well as heater bands.

And one really important thing to understand about the manufacturing of plastics is when you melt plastics, they expand just a little bit. We'll touch on that a number of times throughout the presentation. So once that's in, the screw itself is going to push forward in order to inject the plastic into the mold to be in the shape of the part we need. The second thing that happens, then, after it's full is-- I mentioned that plastics expand slightly when melted. When they cool, they shrink a little bit. So that's going to be really important for us.

So the second stage of molding is actually what we call the packing stage, where, as the plastic's trying to shrink back to smaller, we're trying to compensate for that by pushing more and more material back in through the middle, the hot and molten section still in order to keep our part as close to the shape of the negative in the mold as we can in order to do that.

After that, it will cool for a little bit longer. The mold opens. Parts come out. And we repeat as necessary.

JACOB WEINSTOCK: So we're now going to talk about thinking about how is your design ready for production. So potentially in the past, you might have to manually inspect various elements of your design. And you can imagine if you have hundreds of design features in a particular molded part, takes a lot of time. It also takes a lot of training. You need to be very experienced to spot various problems and errors which might occur from your design. However, we're going to show you some design tools available in Fusion 360, which are going to allow you to get instant feedback on various design problems which you might encounter and also allow you to create a component which is ready for simulation. So you can go straight to that simulation stage to verify that your part is, in fact, ready to be made.

TIM VANAST: So first we want to talk about design considerations. All manufacturing methods really have some different design rules that you need to follow. If you don't follow those, there are some pitfalls we end up dealing with. So we just want to talk through some of these so you're aware of them, of not only what you should be doing, but also how the software can help you to do those things.

So the first one is draft angle. If we look at the part on the left, the gray is the part. The blue is sort of part of our tool. Effectively, you would have blue on the other side, the bottom side of this, as well. But as soon as it's ready to be ejected from the tool, they would separate. We've got two halves of the mold that open. The part comes out. If we look on the left, that one, it's got straight vertical walls. So we're going to have a couple problems here.

When we try to actually eject this and push the part out, well, the part is going to scrape because everything is so tight there. And so we're going to end up with scrape marks and just visual defects on our part. The other thing that becomes a challenge is if we look at what's underneath that section of blue there, if we're trying to separate those, well, there's nothing there. And there's no way for air to get in. And so we effectively create a vacuum trying to get this part off. Makes it really hard to remove the parts.

So one of the things with injection molding, we always want to include draft angles on our walls. You can see on the right they're angled out just a bit. So when we go to open this, first of all, as soon as it sort of breaks free, well, there's no more scraping of the walls. And, of course, air can rush in there to allow our part to open up easily.

JACOB WEINSTOCK: So applying some of those lessons we now know about draft angle to the keypad that we're making, we had some issues with the keycaps. So the keycaps are actually what we call a two shot overmold. So it's two components, basically. We have that inner green section, which is a clear material. Then the orange component is molded over the top of the green component. That's why it's called an overmold. And both these sides of the keycaps need to have draft. And there's a lot of straight surfaces there and a few small features, as well, which we're going to touch on in a second. And all of those needed draft. So that's something we had to implement after the first version of our keycap design.

So to analyze your components in Fusion, we have this thing called the Design Advice tool. And what it allows you to do is really quickly highlight and isolate areas of your component or components, multiple components which require drafts. So in this case, I've used it. I've clicked the keycap. And as you can see, those red surfaces are highlighted, which indicates they have insufficient draft.

So I'm now going to show you a video on how you actually use this tool. So you can see, I have my component open. I click the Design Advice tool from the inspect menu. I click my solid body. I click my pull direction and press Analyze. And very quickly the tool can highlight those areas which require drafts. So it's highlighted me the surfaces. And I mentioned small features, as well. You can see on the bottom there a very small feature there, which does also require draft. Every surface where you can needs draft.

So this tool is great for finding those hard to see areas, especially if your component is very complex. I mean, this is quite a simple part, really. But you can imagine loads and loads of features. Sometimes it's easy to miss. So using that Design Advice tool, it's a really good way to find where you need draft.

TIM VANAST: So wall thickness is another one. Earlier I mentioned the shrinkage of plastic as it cools. If we look at our part on the right that has a very uniform wall section, what we gain from that is that effectively, as that cools, everything will cool and kind of become solid all about the same time. And that's going to allow us to have very uniform shrinkage that we get. If we don't have that, what we call-- again, we've got differential shrinkage. That ultimately creates, I guess, warpage, or out of shape. Our part becomes out of shape.

If we look at the part on the left, there we've got all kinds of various thicknesses. You know, that really thick section on the right side of that, that's going to have a lot of material, a lot of heat. And it's going to take longer for the heat to all get out into the mold. And so that's going to stay hot longer. It's going to shrink more than the other areas. The bottom of that part has a very thin section. That's going to freeze really fast and have, again, different shrinkage than either the thick section or that nominal section on the left.

Again, this is going to create problems for us, first of all, from a quality part, a quality of our part perspective, in that, again, our part is not going to shrink very uniformly, which is going to give us warpage or out of shape movement on our part once it's produced. The other thing is because that thick section is there, that's going to take longer than everything else to cool down. And so the ability to produce these very quickly is going to be hampered by that. It's going to slow down what our cycle time can be.

And so getting wall thickness right is a huge step towards making sure our part will be quality and our parts will be production ready.

JACOB WEINSTOCK: So again, taking some of those considerations onto the keypad, which we're making for the Factory this year. We tried where possible to maintain a uniform wall thickness. So this is actually the enclosure, the top component of the part. And maybe some of you with sharp eyes can spot there is a certain feature which is slightly thinner than the rest.

Again, you can use that design advice tool. So it's the same tool we showed earlier with the draft angle. But this time we're going to analyze the wall thickness. And you can see, with this view it's quite nice because it shows you a color spectrum of the different wall thicknesses across a component. So you can't always maintain wall thickness, a constant wall thickness. But where you can, it's always best to. So this is just showing there that top face is quite a lot thinner than the rest of the enclosure. And for the reasons Tim mentioned, that's going to cause a few problems when it actually comes to manufacturing.

So we also had some issues with the keycaps themselves. So I'm now going to show you some of the ways we fix those. So you can see with our first iteration of the keycap the underside component where the interface is, which attaches it to the keypad itself, we had a very thin section there, that plus-shaped section. So the way we actually fix that in Fusion 360 is using the Replace Face tool. And this is a great tool, I think, for plastic design in general. So you can see, I rolled a timeline back.

I create a surface offset of the underside surface of the keycap then roll forward. And you can kind of see the surface there created beforehand. An then come to the Replace Face tool. I click that source, really thin source face. I click the target face. And you can see how it's made that wall thickness really nice and uniform. And what's nice about that Replace Face tool is it maintains that curvature on the underside, rather than a straight extrusion, which you can kind of see initially. It's always best, where you can, to maintain those curved surfaces. So I do recommend using the Replace Face tool where you can.

TIM VANAST: So undercuts are another problem with injection molding. Again, we have these two halves of the mold. We need them to be able to separate and the part to come out. And so in this case, we see on the left we sort of have that, I guess, rib sticking through the middle there. Well, there's no way we can actually pull open the mold now because it's what we would call die locked or an undercut. It's trapped.

And so if you can even get the part out, you're going to break that little feature off. Or worst case, you can't even break it off and it's just truly stuck in your mold. So now to be honest, we create designs with undercuts quite often. But when we do that, we have to be aware of it. We have to know that we're doing it because in the tool itself we're going to have to create some action or a slide or something that before the mold opens, something mechanical moves out of the way, which will allow the tool to open and the part to come out.

And so we have to be aware of those. It's going to cost-- It's going to add complexity and cost to our tool. Doesn't mean we can't do it. We just have to be aware and we have to make sure we're communicating with whoever is building the tool. Hey, I know this is here. What's that going to do to the cost of my tool?

JACOB WEINSTOCK: So again, we can use that Design Advice tool to analyze undercut. So in our case, we had some snap fit features. We're going to talk about them later. But you can see, again, those red regions are actually slight undercut. So this could potentially cause a problem with manufacturing.

So a way we considered to solve this problem was to add something called a Shut-off. So you can see what I did with this exploration of a design feature was create a sketch on the underside surface of the enclosure. I projected that slight undercut from the snap fit features.

I created a sketch offset here. I think it was 1 millimeter. You don't have to add too much. I then extruded, cut through the body itself. So you can imagine if we have this extrude cut, we wouldn't need any action or anything like that. We could just pull down the mold as we would usually without an undercut. So I extrude up to the surface of the snap fit. And I also add some small fillets. It's always a good idea to add fillets in sharp corners where you can when injection molding just to improve plastic flow and stress concentrations, things like that.

So you can see there with that view, there's no undercut. So go back into my Design Advice tool, analyze the same body. And you can see in that section, the red's disappeared. With the final key pad, we actually didn't decide to do this. Just for aesthetic reasons, we didn't like the cut through on the enclosure. So we did actually include some side action. But if aesthetics isn't important, this is a way to change your design and not increase the cost of your setup.

Yeah, so plastic rules-- what are they? There are ways to add into your fusion design certain plastic rules which actually prevent design issues before they happen. So what I mean by that is we can select a certain material or a certain rule from our library. So by default, we have some inbuilt ones. So in this example, I've just opened the ABS 1.5mm rule. And you can see how it has various parameters associated with that rule. So what that means is when you assign that plastic rule to your component, it automatically applies all those parameters to your file. So it kind of automatically creates them. So you can see there on the right hand side, we have thickness, draft angle, clearance, et cetera. And all that's based on the plastic rule.

So I've actually assigned a plastic rule to this component. So I'm going to show you how they work in reality. So I'm going to create a very simple box-like shape, similar to the keypad which we see. And you can see when I add in a taper angle there, which is the draft angle, I can type in DA. And this is the inbuilt plastic rule. So it's actually created it a formula and I can just type in the parameter name, which does save a lot of time. And you just know your designs are going to be consistent because you have those rules, which are already there for you.

You can also see the rules come into effect where I add the shell. So I can click the underside here. And automatically, without me even typing in it, typing in a value, it actually assigned the thickness rule, which I've assigned. So actually automatically assigns various dimensions for you on your component, which is really nice. It does save a lot of time.

So in addition to our inbuilt rules you can also create your own custom rules. So in this example, I create a polycarbonate rule. So I change the name of the rule, which I want to make. I can choose the material here. And you can change things like thickness ranges, which is actually what the design advice is based on. So the design advice is looking at these parameters when it's judging whether your part is good or not.

So I can change the draft angle. I can change the minimum draft angle, as well. So all these different parameters you can change. So you can imagine if you have a certain setup which you know works for your machine or your manufacturing process, you can create a custom rule and save it to your library for future use, which is really nice.

TIM VANAST: So design automations are another one of the things built into Fusion as we design because, again, there's going to be a number of things that are consistent and, I guess, usual within designs of our plastic parts. So a boss is a very common feature that is put in typically for assembly in order to attach to maybe the mating, the lower portion of this encasing. And so bosses-- but again, even when we design these, we need to keep these sort of plastic rules in place-- so things like wall thickness, draft angle, are we adding a rib or not. All of these things are important that we include throughout the design of this feature.

JACOB WEINSTOCK: So the way we can create these boss features in Fusion is by using some of the inbuilt automations, which Tim mentioned. So I can come up to the top here, press boss. Choose a location. You can see it opens up this window. So in this example, I'm dragging the boss height up to match the thickness of the enclosure extrude. An in turn on the base-- and you can see that kind of orange section there-- actually create your boss on the other side, too, which is I think is really cool.

I can then come into the rib section and I can add ribs. So by default it adds four. But I changed it to one. I can adjust the position of these ribs. And in just a few clicks you've created quite a complex design feature, which otherwise might take you a good hour if you're just doing sketches and extrudes and revolves. Again, I use that Replace Face tool I mentioned earlier to adjust the rib to match the face of the enclosure.

I didn't decide-- you know, I don't really like that angle on the ribs. So again, I can come in. I can change these advanced parameters, set it to zero. And yeah, I'm happy with that. It looks good. There you go. There's the one on the other side, too, which is, I think, pretty nice.

So similar to the custom plastic rules, you can also create presets for these design automations. So in this example, I start creating a preset for a certain boss. So I just have this kind of plate geometry here just to demonstrate what I mean. So I change the offset. I change the thread diameter from 2 to 3 if I want a slightly thicker screw that's going to go through. I can add a counter ball, for example. I can add a step for some sort of locating feature on another component. I can see these advanced features. So I think I changed the base radius there, so slightly larger radius.

So if you have a certain setup of parameters which you know you like for these features, using these presets you can kind of save that for use again and again and again. And the whole point of these automations, I would say, is just to really speed up that design process of making sure you have something in a few clicks which you can create, which you know is going to be right every time for manufacture.

So when I'm happy, I can come up to the top. Press that plus button. Give the preset a name. And then it saved in my Fusion for future use.

TIM VANAST: So Lip and Groove is another feature that is used commonly with plastics and assemblies. If we don't do something like this, sometimes it can be hard to match the two mating parts up, again, based on talk about that warpage earlier, where our part isn't actually come out the shape exactly that we wanted it to. This is something that sort of helps to align two mating parts. And again, we have these automation features that allow us to do this.

JACOB WEINSTOCK: Cool, yeah. So you're going to see in this video how I can do that. Super simple in this case. I can just come up to the top. But just to show you that, there's no lip and groove currently. I come up to the top, press Lip and press the outside edge. And again, you can actually create the lip and the groove together in one feature, which is kind of cool, I think. It's two bodies are being affected by one feature.

So you can see there's actually a pull direction in that preview. You can see the red outline of the lip and groove. Again, you can change the advanced parameters, create presets if you want if you have a certain geometry which you like. Press OK. So yeah, this is quite a simple example of a planar lip and groove. But what's nice about this tool-- I don't show it in this example-- but you can also create nonplanar lips and grooves for more advanced mating features.

TIM VANAST: So Snap features, again, it's another way for assembly between two different parts. Similar to, again, another way to attach things like the boss we showed earlier. But we don't need a screw to go with that. Snap features can be, again, all molded into the original part in the first place. And all of this can be designed in via the automation tool, again, to include some of those rules that we want to include when designing plastics.

JACOB WEINSTOCK: So here's a video of how you do that. We have a more advanced stage now of our keypad design. And we actually did use snap fit features in the final version. So you can see, I choose a position. You can kind of see a preview there. It's wrong orientation. So I just rotate that round really easily with that drag handle. I changed the extent to [INAUDIBLE], which kind of just pushes it down to the bottom of the geometry. Change my advanced parameters. I think I changed the overall length. I gave it a slight taper, as well.

And hopefully you can see this is, I would say, quite an advanced feature. You have a lot of different-- if you were to do this by hand, it would take a lot of sketches, extrudes, which you could do. No problem with that. And you apply the same lessons from this. But just using these automation features, it really speeds up that process. So there you go. You can see both sides of the snap fit are created.

Yeah. So that's the negative side, as well. So again, it does affect both sides. So you can do both sides of your enclosure in one design feature.

TIM VANAST: Great. So now let's actually jump over into the simulation workspace. So one of the first things that we want to do is, of course, I want to verify the changes. So Jacob showed earlier, hey, there were different wall thicknesses. Well, that's not good. OK, so let's just confirm the changes.

And this is true with any of these things that we look at with the design advice. Sometimes we know that we break the rules but we just want to confirm. Is there something that we've done accidentally that surprises us? Like oh, I didn't realize that was thick or thin. Great. It's just a way to check this. So in this case, we can see the wall thicknesses are more uniform. We also notice at this point we do have those snap features which are thinner. Again, in that case, we know them and we expect that, and that's OK.

So from here we want to jump into the simulation workspace within Fusion. You can see there's a whole list of different ways-- things we could simulate. In this case, we're really going to jump into the injection molding simulation here. So one of the first things we're going to do-- in fact, if we go from the top left to the right in our menus, once we've imported our part or opened this up, we want to then look at the materials. We want to verify that we've selected the material that this is going to be used from.

So in this case, we can go to our material database. There are over 14,000 different plastic materials that have been characterized and put in this database. If I'm not exactly sure what material or what grade I'm going to use, I could use any of the generic ones at the top. So I could find the generic polycarbonate and use that. It would be a good place to start.

In this case, I do know that it is a LEXAN 121r. So I could just simply do a search for LEXAN. And that's going to give me a whole list of different LEXAN materials that are available. Again, I could find the LEXAN 121r. I could have also done a search for LEXAN 121r. I could have just searched for 121r, would have gotten there, too.

And then from here we've got a whole bunch of other details about this information that we could look at if we wanted to, or if we knew there was a specific thing we were looking for in the material. So once we have the material selected, well then we're going to look at adding a gate. And a gate is really that location from which the material is going to be injected into our part during the manufacturing. So by default, you see there's sort of this cone in the middle of the part there. The software, by default, puts something very central in your part just so there's a start point.

But in this case, we've decided we don't actually want a gate there. We have a different location that we've kind of discussed. Let's put it over here as a good first place. So we're going to come over here. We're going to basically turn that one off, since we're not using it. We're going to add a gate.

I'm going to put it on this end right there. And from there, again-- and we could do multiple gates if we needed to. But in this case, we're going to start with a single gate to see how that works for us. So next we can confirm the process settings if we wish to do this. So within here if we go to our process settings, these are the settings you would actually use to run the machine itself. And really we're just focused on three of them here. One is the temperature of the mold, the temperature of the melted material, and there's also injection time.

The mold and melt temperatures, those values are actually coming from that database. So every material, all 14,000 plus materials have those values that the manufacturers said, this is the value we recommend you do that with. The injection time is the other one, and that's really the rate at which we push the plastic into the mold. In this case, there's an automatic setting.

So most of the time, if I'm doing simulations here infusion, I really don't even look at this because I know that the default settings are reasonable settings in the first place. So after that, we do have a pre-check. We can see at the top of the screen there, there's a little green check mark. If we're missing some information, there would be a yellow or a red check mark there. And then we're going to go to solve. We're going to click this. We're going to launch the analysis.

Once that is done we'll get a pop up saying it's done. You can now look at your results. So we're going to go into the results space here. So once this loads up there's really a few different things-- well, there's a number of things that we can look at in our results.

So to start with, we're sort in the results, the guided results. Next to that, there's a little button to get us to the full results. And finally, one to the molding process. But we're going to start here in the guided. Again, one of the first things we see-- there's red. It says "unlikely to fill." Well, that can't be good, now can it?

There's also some that's going to be hard. But it gives us some guided results. The first thing here is, will my part fill 10%? Probably not going to even fill this part. Well, that's not good. What could we do about it? So fortunately, there's some next steps here that say, well, these are things you could potentially do. We could add an injection location. We could move our injection location.

Another option, we could make our walls a little bit thicker. That might help, or change materials. And so the next steps is really help to guide somebody. Hey, these are options that are available that you might want to consider. So this next step, then, is sort of a question of will my part have visual defects. So if we have a part that has visual aspects to it, we want to understand what's going on and where these might occur. There's really kind of two different things.

One would be the weld line location. Welds, again, are sort of where that flow front will go around something and come back together. They typically have a little bit of a strength reduction in that area. And they can also potentially have a visual defect, depending on the specific material and the process settings and the specific surface finish of our part.

And then lastly, let's look at will my part warp? Again, warp is that out of shape movement. Because we want to understand how much is our part not the shape we intended. So in this case, we get to see this. And we can say, OK, well what is the tolerance that's acceptable? So in this case, the software certainly doesn't know what our tolerance will be. So we have the ability here to shift that. But this will give us a go/no go, like hey, depending on what our tolerance is. It's just a small area. It's none. It's a large area, whatever that would be.

So then let's look at the results portion here. If I click to that results tab, we get sort of this full list of all the results we can look at. We see we're sort of starting with full confidence. We can switch to fill animation and we can animate this. For me, I love looking at this because it helps give me an understanding how is my part filling, what does it look like. I've mentioned weld lines. We can see on the edge there, oh, that's where my weld lines will occur. We can just notice anything else about the way it fills that we like or don't like.

So quality prediction is sort of another guided result we can look at to say, is there something else going on here? Now, Fill Confidence would directly relate to this. But there could be other things that might cause problems we could look at. So injection pressure is a pretty key one we want to check out. A typical molding machine has about 180 megapascals of pressure that we can push the plastic with. We want to confirm what it is on our parts. Here, we're at what, 97?

For just our part, we would love to be about 50% of that. So we're a little high on this. Again, we can look at any of these results. This one is the volumetric shrinkage. It's sort of that gauge of how much different, how different is that shrinkage that occurs when our parts are manufactured? We love that to be a nice, tight range if we can achieve that.

Here's a plot kind of highlighting those well line locations. Again, sync mark is sort of the other one that we can look at here. Now, this part is very uniform wall thickness. So we're really not going to show much here. But if we have a part that has a variety of wall thicknesses, we could see where we would get some visual defects from that.

And one of the last ones here is really our deflection results. Again, it's sort of that, the full color spectrum of how much is my part moving in ways that I don't necessarily want it to. And then we can be a judge, then, of is this acceptable, is it not acceptable? And if it's not, we could then look at what things could we change in order to improve this situation.

The last results section here we want to talk about is just Molding Process Overview. I know some people occasionally will start with this one. But as this shows, it's really this overview of our process. We're talking about the filling phase. We can even see the animation there. It's going to jump next into the packing or that compensation, quick blip of cooling, and then our final part shape.

And you'll notice the little warnings or errors down below saying, hey you better fix this or not. But this is kind of a cool one, again, just for an overview, if not for yourself, potentially for someone else you're going to explain some of these results that you're seeing to. So within the simulation workspace, there's a place here called Simplify. And this is really great for those what if scenarios.

Again, earlier it showed, hey, our pressures are too high. Well, what could I do? Well, what if I change the material? What if I change my thickness? So if we go to the Simplify workspace, we have the ability to clone this simulation project in this study.

And what's really cool about this is if I do this here, I have the ability to actually edit my model. I can change my geometry if I wish. And since we've done this duplication, well, then I can change this without actually affecting my base model. So here, we started with a 1.8 millimeter wall thickness. I've created a 2 millimeter and a 2.25 millimeter wall thickness. I can then simulate those to understand, hey, did this help? Did this not help? Was it worth whatever it is that we're adding to this?

OK, so here we are. Let's compare those wall thickness versions, then. Let's see what is actually happening as we compare the three of them. So we can go to our results here. But what we have is the ability to do a compare. So if I go to this compare workspace, we'll see, well, now we have the ability to see multiple studies at the same time. By default, it comes up as the same. But it's very easy here to say, well, let's change this back. Where was our 1.8mm thickness? And let's compare that.

So clearly we're definitely much better here. We've gotten rid of the not going to fill. We still have a little bit difficult to fill. So well, let's see. What happens if we go to the 2.25? And here we get to see that result. And we can be like, oh, look at that. Looks much better. Wonderful. OK, so now I feel a little better. From within this space, too, again, we can compare not only just the fill confidence, but we can actually look at other results, as well, in order to see, are there other things that we want to look at, be it the fill time? And in this case, our fill time doesn't look that different. But we could. And we'll show in a minute, compare different gate locations to see how does that influence it.

We can also look at things like pressure. If we go to our pressure on both of these, we can see on the right we're almost 80 megapascals. On the left we're more like 62. I'm more comfortable with that value. So good to know. We kind of like that as a value there. So next, then, we can look at our gate location options. We tried a few of these. In fact, when we started talking to whoever was going to produce these parts for us, they were like, well have you considered two gates?

Well, I hadn't. But let's look to see the influence of that. So a couple of things, especially if I have two gates on a part or more than one gate, I want to make sure it's very balanced. So we see these options. It's hard to tell, but I did move that lower gate around a little bit. But we want to see where it feels like both halves, if you want to call it that, at approximately the same time.

And with all of these, again, we can compare any of the results we want to see. Here I'm going to take a look at the deflection to see, well, while lower pressure or gate locations might be something I'm interested in, I always care about my deflection. I want to understand how much movement. And sometimes gate location can have a significant impact on that.

If we look at these between these scenarios, while we're from 0.5 to 0.53 to 0.55, like wow, that's almost nothing. And so I'm not worried about that. But that's good confirmation. By helping one thing, I didn't make something else significantly worse. So in this case, I'm pretty happy with this one on the lower right corner.

And there's other results in here, too. In the end, though, what we're really after, again, we're trying to make a quality part. And we're trying to make it as fast as we can. And so we want to make these decisions early, up front, to improve our part quality and reduce our cycle time.

What we've shown you so far, again, within Fusion 360 simulation or the injection molding simulation, we kind of looked at part design. We didn't really look at materials. But we could. We could have run other simulations with different materials to show us hey, this is what we get. If we take this a step further, we get into-- I guess at that point we're leaving Fusion at this point and we're jumping into full blown mold flow, where we can look at tool design and process optimization.

So I want to show this real briefly. But here we're in Moldflow, which is Autodesk's full injection molding simulation software. And here we get to add more. So if we just have our single cavity here, we can actually do things like add the gate and add our runner system. This is basically how the material gets through the tool to our part. And we can see how does that influence the quality of my part.

We can go further, as well, beyond just some of the basic information. Well, what if this is a multi cavity? We can include this and say, all right, let's make this a two cavity. Again, we're going to add more information here. We're going to add our gates, our runner system, so sort of the material feed system here, in order to fill these parts. We can even add the tool, the box of our tool around it. We can add cooling lines, which are used in an injection molding tool to stabilize the temperature of our mold.

Again, we're going to do this. We get into similar outputs that Fusion simulation injection molding has. But again, there's a lot of other things we can see in Moldflow. What we're showing here is Moldflow advisor. There's also Moldflow insight that we can look at a few other things, not just thermoplastic injection molding. We can look at thermosets. We can look at compression molding or injection compression, or a variety of other advanced manufacturing options that we have.

JACOB WEINSTOCK: Cool. Thanks a lot, Tim. I'm just going to summarize what hopefully you've learned today. You've kind of seen how we've used Fusion and Moldflow, some of the lessons we learned when designing our enclosure for the factory this year.

So to recap, we've shown how you can use Plastic Design Rules. So in Fusion, those are parameters which are either custom or standard to ensure you have consistent geometry across your different parts. We've showed how you can use some automations to create things like bosses, snap fits, things like that, and really speed up your design process. We've shown you how to use the Design advisor. And that's going to highlight areas which are actually breaking the rules and you might want to change, before finally, going into Simulation, whether that be in Fusion 360 or in Moldflow, just to finally, ensure that your final part is going to be what you expect.