Before the commercialization of finite elements codes, design of extrusion dies has been more a matter of role of the thumb than engineering. More than a decade ago Almax Mori understood that the key to meet the future requirements of extrusion companies was to integrate design offices with a technology capable to assist engineers at the die design stage.
In Mori we perform finite elements analysis to engineer better dies and we have been successfully implementing Altair Mechanical Engineer Suite in our production cycle since 2009. But what makes the difference is the hard job we did together with our customer and not a picture predicting the nose piece. Behind a die that does not require corrections there are tens of right decisions and probably a state-of-the-art manufacturing technology. Behind the possibility to guarantee the seam-weld integrity there's a good constitutive equation for each aluminum alloy. Behind a mandrel that initially looks to be hopeless but finally exceeds the expectations there's the know-how we have been building-up in the last 34 years.
The power of this approach stays in the fact that for very complex profiles it is possible to understand if the tolerances required by the final user can be reached during extrusion or not; profiles that yesterday were refused are today accepted by extrusions after the die engineering... that’s the revolution. And this is done for each single die in production!
Being recognized world-wide as leaders in the extrusion simulation process, we felt the need to share with the industry our best achievements. In 2018 was born “FEA in Extrusion Die Design”, an ongoing series dealing with the opportunities that finite elements analysis (FEA) offers to extrusion industry. The articles have been published on the Light Metal Age Journal. Below you can download the official reprints.