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Salomon Reduces Mold Trials, Cuts Costs Using Moldflow Plastics Insight Software

By Catherine Baghdiguian, Moldflow Corporation

The Salomon Company (Annecy, France) manufactures sporting goods, including skiing and snowboarding equipment, roller blades, bicycles and hiking gear for year-round use. Many products in this wide range of offerings require plastic injection molded components. Philippe Ruiz, drawing office technician in Salomon's plastics division, is in charge of rheologic studies. His customers are other members of the Salomon drawing offices and the technicians who develop molds. His customers' specifications are always the same: the plastic part must meet the quality specifications for each shot. In practice, some products must meet precise dimensional tolerances and have excellent visual quality. With those specifications in mind, the company decided to implement Moldflow Plastics Insight^TM (MPI^®) software. The aim was twofold: validate the design while making sure that the part could be manufactured; and help resolve production problems encountered by the injection molders with whom the company works.

Salomon creates 10 percent of the molds required to produce the company's parts in its own machine shop, and the company also has a pilot injection molding facility that allows it to closely connect the results of shop floor trials with the results of MPI analyses. Salomon's drawing offices use Pro/ENGINEER and Freeforme design software, and the technicians provide Ruiz with files that he can read into the MPI environment. Currently, Salomon licenses MPI/Flow, MPI/Cool, MPI/Warp and MPI/Fusion modules. Ruiz is the only user of the software inside the Salomon organization, and he received MPI training from a Moldflow application engineer at Moldflow's facility in Lyon. He quickly mastered the software and now works full time on MPI projects. Salomon analyzes about 25 percent of the parts they produce; parts are chosen for analysis especially if they have complicated geometry, mechanical constraints, aspect ratio problems, tight delivery deadlines or other issues.

For example, one project on which Ruiz worked was a clip for a cross-country ski boot. The part is made of POM material and must withstand a great deal of foot flexion in use. Major issues with this part included minimizing thickness variations and optimizing the injection location to position weld lines in desirable areas. MPI results helped to ensure that this new part design would manufacture correctly from the first mold trial: geometric, mechanical and other specifications all were verified before the part went into production. Without using MPI software, the drawing office technicians and molders would have had more difficulties setting up the part. It is estimated that at least two mold trials were avoided for this part alone by using MPI to verify the design. Each mold trial lasts an average of half a day, in addition to the time required to transport and modify the mold. The mold for this part required no modification to produce successful parts.

"The company now relies on the software because we work on very different parts and tools. For the parts that were analyzed with Moldflow Plastics Insight software, we decreased the number of trials and modifications and managed to simplify our molds, especially the feed and cooling systems, which helps us to save time and reduce the cost of the mold itself," Ruiz concludes.