Ironing Out the Wrinkles

An interesting account of how Altair Inspire Form helped Pragati Engineering address sheet metal formability and inconsistent thinning issues while reducing physical try-out time by 50 percent…

Pragati Engineering, established in 2004, is one of the leading press tool design and manufacturing companies in India. The company manufactures quality made-to-order dies and fixtures for a variety of customers.

With new technologies, facilities, and experience in Press Tooling, the company is confident of seamlessly catering to any requirement in the sheet-metal forming segment.

The company has an impressive list of clients from various sectors and supplies automotive sheet metal parts to leading companies such as Mahindra & Mahindra, Hitachi, JBM, TATA Ficosa, and Federal Management.

Reducing prototype iterations

The Pragati team employs world-class solutions and technologies such as CAD, CAM, CAE, and PLM to give only the best to its clients. On its way to becoming a formidable player in the area of its expertise, the company regularly faces many challenges.
It faced one such unique challenge of cracks and wrinkles formation in one of its products being formed. Because the team earlier used its traditional method of trial and error, it was unable to predict these occurrences. The traditional trial-and-error method forced the team to do die corrections manually and also rebuild a new tool. These unplanned iterations and physical die tryouts substantially increased the product development time and cost and impacted delivery schedules. Product quality and output accuracy was also an issue with the traditional method.

Using Altair HyperWorks to nullify errors

In its search for a reliable solution to fix the issue of crack and wrinkle formation, the Pragati team came across Altair’s Inspire Form through one of its vendors who was already using the software. The vendor strongly recommended Altair Inspire Form as a robust solution to the team.

The team was sure that simulation would play a vital role in improving product quality and reducing the number of physical prototypes. Pragati procured Altair Solution and started using it for all its product lines. Altair Inspire Form helped the team in finding out instances of failure, wrinkles and cracks in sheet metal panel components right at the design stage. This breakthrough eliminated soft tool manufacturing and drastically reduced the number of physical trials.

The Pragati team found immense value in Altair Inspire Form as the solution reduced product development time and also increased design and output accuracy.

Error-free manufacturing saving time and cost

The Pragati team is delighted with its choice of Altair Solutions as they rendered accurate and precise results in terms of formability (FLD), thinning variation, and plastic strain through Altair Inspire Form. Altair Inspire Form also helped the team to easily optimize process parameters, which drastically reduced errors and improved the life of tools. The team was able to reduce the tooling delivery cycle time to just between one and two weeks which earlier used to take almost a month by using traditional trial-and-error method. Altair Inspire Form reduced the physical tryout time by an impressive 50 percent along with improving design accuracy and product quality.

The team used Altair Inspire Form extensively in the Mahindra U321 Shock Tower project and got accurate and speedy results, enabling it to deliver the product within the set timelines and as per agreed quality benchmarks. The team now saves time and development cost by using Altair Inspire Form in all its projects and has done away with their traditional method, which was prone to errors and resulted in inaccurate prototypes and inflated prototyping cost.

The Pragati team is delighted with its choice of Altair Solutions as they rendered accurate and precise results in terms of formability, thinning variation, and plastic strain through Altair Inspire Form.

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