Metal Powder Injection Molding Filling Process Simulation Software Development

It is important to develop the software of powder injection filling process simulation for Metal Powder Injection Molding(MIM) product design , because the defects of MIM products almost form hi the filling process in the process of MIM.In this paper, development of MIM filling process simulation software Moldfill is researched. OOSE (Object Oriented Software Engineering) is used to analyze and design the system and UML (Unified Modeling Language) is used to build user model, static model and dynamic model of the software system. Then the function requirement, event flow, class construction and relation, object communication, database construction and I/O data format are described with UML. The developing process of software was optimized and the readability, the maintainability of the software were improved with this way.Based on the software system design, Visual C++ and Delphi were used to write the MIM filling process simulation software MoldFill. In order to implement the pre-processor system, a meshing method is proposed for trigonal finite element meshing. In the method, mesh's boundary data is got from STL file and dispersed and the dispersed boundary nodes form the finite element mesh, In order to implement the filling analyze system, volume control method is used to track the fluid front, finite element method is used in analyze pressure field analysis in which the iterative algorithm of viscosity and fluid conductance are explained and the matrix form of temperature field is calculated with the finite difference method of time and height direction to compute temperature. In order to implement the graphics function, OpenGL package is used to write program.At last, MoldFill was used to simulate the fluid process of W-Ni-Fe mixture in a apertured mold and the results are as follows: (1) the mesh algorithm is proper to single-connection and multi-connection solids of arbitrary shapes and has eximious quality. The created mesh can be used for finite element calculation. (2)The results of filling fluid analyze system tally with the professional commercial software MoldFlow MPI, which means the system can adapt to actual analytic requirements. (3)Using OpenGL can reduce program workload with high system capability.