SOLIDWORKS Plastics

Plastic parts and injection mold simulation software

What is SOLIDWORKS Plastics software?

SOLIDWORKS® Plastics makes it easy for companies that design plastic parts or injection molds to predict and avoid manufacturing defects during the earliest stages of design, eliminating costly rework, improving quality, and accelerating time-to-market.

Intuitive workflow and design advice

SOLIDWORKS Plastics works directly on your 3D model, avoiding translation issues. You see the impact of design changes right away. Powerful and fast state-of-the-art meshing covers geometries from thin-walled parts to very thick and solid parts.

An intuitive interface leads you step by step. Guided analysis, intelligent defaults, and automated processes ensure correct setup, even if you rarely use simulation tools. The SOLIDWORKS Plastics material database contains thousands of commercial plastics and is fully customizable.

Part designers get rapid feedback on how modifications to wall thickness, gate locations, materials, or geometry can effect the manufacturing of their part, while mold designers can quickly optimize multicavity and family mold layouts and feed systems—including sprues, runners, and gates.

Overview Demo

Get to know SOLIDWORKS Plastics

SOLIDWORKS Plastics Capabilities

SOLIDWORKS Plastics provides technical insights to engineers during the design process so they can innovate while reducing costs and time to market.

Optimize Plastic Part Production

SOLIDWORKS Plastics products can be used to optimize part wall thickness, gate locations, and runner system size and layout to ensure the mold works right the first time, reducing or eliminating the need for rework.

Scrap Reduction

SOLIDWORKS Plastics makes it easy to analyze design iterations at the earliest stages of product development—when the cost of change is least and the impact on manufacturability is greatest—increasing part quality and minimizing production scrap rates.

Reduce time to market

SOLIDWORKS Plastics helps to predict and avoid potential manufacturing defects before any mold tooling is cut, virtually eliminating the need for time-consuming and costly mold rework and ensuring project deadlines and ship dates are met on time and within budget.

Collaborate and Report

SOLIDWORKS Plastics provides automated report generation tools that facilitate the sharing and interpretation of simulation results, allowing increased collaboration among extended development teams.

"Evolve Design Solutions appreciates the excellent customer service, product knowledge and technical support provided by TriMech, our SOLIDWORKS Value Added Reseller (VAR).”

Aldo Balatti

Principal, Evolve Design Solutions

“Our engineering processes are well defined and well documented. I can tell new customers with confidence that we’re delivering on milestones because we’re tracking our performance on speed and quality every day.”

Ray Minator

Owner, Inertia Engineering + Design

SOLIDWORKS Plastics Features

Optimize your plastic part design process with a suite of easy-to-use solutions

SOLIDWORKS Plastics part analysis

Plastic Part Analysis

Intuitive simulation software designed specifically for Plastic Part Designers

The most cost-effective time to optimize plastic parts for manufacturability is during the initial stages of product design. Skipping this step often leads to an inefficient mold design with an extremely narrow “good parts” processing window, resulting in high reject rates and time-to-market delays.

CAD-integrated: fully embedded in the SOLIDWORKS 3D design environment so you can analyze and modify designs for manufacturability while you optimize for form, fit, and function
Easy to learn and use: takes only minutes to learn and does not require extensive analysis or plastics expertise
Facilitates design team communication: web-based HTML reports make it fast and easy to communicate simulation results and design advice to all members of the design-to-manufacturing team

Mold Design Analysis

Intuitive simulation software designed specifically for Mold Designers and Mold Makers

SOLIDWORKS Plastics Professional gives designers or builders of injection molds an accurate, easy-to-use way to optimize them. Quickly create and analyze single, multicavity, and family mold layouts.

Avoid costly mold rework: ensure molds will work right the first time to avoid time-consuming, costly, and unnecessary rework
Optimize feed system design: analyze sprues, runners, and gates to balance runner systems; optimize gate type, size, and location; and determine the best runner layout, size, and cross-sectional shape
Estimate cycle time, clamp tonnage, and shot size: quote tooling projects quickly and accurately; size the injection molding machine for a given mold; optimize cycle time, and reduce plastics material scrap

SOLIDWORKS Plastics Mold Analysis

SOLIDWORKS Plastics advanced simulation

Advanced plastic part simulation

SOLIDWORKS Plastics Premium includes advanced simulation functionality that allows users to analyze mold cooling line layouts and predict molded part warpage.

Cooling line analysis: Design and analyze simple or complex mold cooling line layouts
Reduce time and cost: Optimize cooling system design to minimize cycle times and decrease manufacturing costs
Improve overall process: Optimize part and mold design, material selection, and processing parameters to reduce or eliminate molded part warpage

SOLIDWORKS Plastics Packages

Three simulation packages to choose from

Package

SOLIDWORKS Plastics Standard

Ensure parts are manufactureable during the design process. Easy to learn and use, SOLIDWORKS Plastics Standard is fully embedded within SOLIDWORKS CAD so you can analyze and modify part designs at the same time you optimize for form, fit, and function.

Package

SOLIDWORKS Plastics Professional

Builds upon SOLIDWORKS Plastics Standard to analyze mold designs. With easy-to-use tools you can quickly analyze single-and multi-cavity, and family mold layouts including sprues, runners, and gates, to estimate cycle time, and to optimize feed system design.

Package

SOLIDWORKS Plastics Premium

Includes SOLIDWORKS Plastics Professional with advanced simulation functionality to analyze mold cooling line layouts, and part warpage. Optimizing cooling line minimizes cycle times and decreases manufacturing costs.

SOLIDWORKS Plastics Matrix

Compare the different versions of SOLIDWORKS Plastics software

Capability	SOLIDWORKS Plastics Standard	SOLIDWORKS Plastics Professional	SOLIDWORKS Plastics Premium
Ease of Use	●	●	●
Design Data Reuse	●	●	●
Materials Database	●	●	●
Meshing	●	●	●
Parallel Computing (Multi-core)	●	●	●
Filling Phase (1st Stage Injection)	●	●	●
Instantaneous Fill Time Plot	●	●	●
Sink Mark Analysis	●	●	●
eDrawings Support	●	●	●
Fill Time	●	●	●
Ease of Fill	●	●	●
Results Adviser	●	●	●
Pressure at End of Fill	●	●	●
Flow Front Temperature	●	●	●
Temperature at End of Fill	●	●	●
Shear Rate	●	●	●
Cooling Time	●	●	●
Weld Lines	●	●	●
Air Traps	●	●	●
Sink Marks	●	●	●
Frozen Layer Fraction at End of Fill	●	●	●
Clamp Force	●	●	●
Cycle Time	●	●	●
Symmetry Analysis		●	●
Packing Phase (2nd Stage Injection)		●	●
Runner Balancing		●	●
Runner Design Wizard		●	●
Sprues and Runners		●	●
Hot and Cold Runners		●	●
Multi-cavity Molds		●	●
Family Molds		●	●
Mold Inserts		●	●
Volumetric Shrinkage		●	●
Density at End of Pack		●	●
Exports STL, NASTRAN		●	●
Export with Mechanical Properties ABAQUS®, ANSYS, DigiMat®		●	●
Cooling Lines			●
Baffles and Bubblers			●
Conformal Cooling Channels			●
Runner Domain Category			●
Sink Mark Profiles			●
Mold Temperature at Cooling End			●
Displacement Due to Residual Stress			●

SOLIDWORKS Plastics Benefits

Easy to use software which will adapt to your business process

Boost product innovation

Grow market share and differentiate through groundbreaking product design.

Empower the engineering team with intuitive, powerful 3D simulation tools to compare design scenarios and new ideas to bring innovative products to market.

Decrease development costs

Reduce the need for costly prototyping by integrating virtual testing early in product development.

Reduce outsourcing costs by testing performance and functionality internally.

Improve production efficiency

Improve plastic part production performance, verifying part and mold designs in the earliest stages of development.

Make changes early

Reduce the challenge of determining how your part or mold design impacts manufacturing and how manufacturing will impact your design.

3DEXPERIENCE Compass

Looking for a Cloud Alternative?

3DEXPERIENCE Works provides a Safe, Social, Connected, Informed and Structured alternative to SOLIDWORKS Plastics for team leaders, project managers and other professionals who want to manage data on the cloud and collaborate without constraints.

Safe: Customer controlled access. Transparent cloud backup. Encrypted communication protocols. Data always safe-no overwrite, no loss of data.

Social: Integrated structured and unstructured collaboration tools enabling social innovation. Collaborate on product design or engage with your stakeholders early in product development.

Connected: Every user always connected to a single, common database. Access data anywhere, anytime, on any device. Review and markup models.

Informed: Choose from the widget library, Create and share Dashboards. Get the latest information about your product development. Always have access to your latest data.

Structured: Zero overhead data management - store and manage data across collaborative spaces, share information in communities. Find indexed data faster by using tags, custom search, etc.