Use the Flow Volume tool to create the flow volume to analyze
the deformation of the material.
One of the main goals of extrusion analysis is to understand how the material deforms
through the die openings and forms the extruded profile. In order to understand
this, these openings (or the cavities) in the die cap, die mandrel, and the feeder
has to created and modeled. This region is often denoted as negative
volume or flow volume.
Typically the modeling starts from the solids representing the die assembly solids,
hence, this flow volume needs to be created to analyze the deformation of the
material. The image below shows a die assembly in transparent gray and the flow
volume in blue.
From the Extrusion ribbon, click the
Flow Volume tool.
Select all the die solids to generate the flow volume.
Success of this step is assured by:
Only selecting valid die components.
Not selecting the surfaces and lines. You can easily delete these stray
components by inspecting the model. There are two ways of doing this.
Hide the main die solids and inspect what is left behind. If
they are irrelevant, they should be deleted.
Inspect the components in the Model Browser
and check their mass. Generally anything that has 0 mass has to
be deleted.
If your main die solids themselves have 0 mass, then there are holes in
the model. They can be cleaned using the Patch tool.
If the created flow volume has 0 mass, it can be repaired using the
Patch tool.
This step fails only if there are errors (that cannot be automatically
corrected) by Inspire Extrude. It is best to start with die
solids that do not have errors.
