Decisions are made from memory
Tonnage, cycle time and achievable output are still argued from experience and a spreadsheet. A wrong call stays invisible for months — until it is expensive.
Aluminium extrusion · Simulation software
Process feasibility, line throughput and full-line material flow — modelled before the first billet is heated.
Why this exists
Tonnage, cycle time and achievable output are still argued from experience and a spreadsheet. A wrong call stays invisible for months — until it is expensive.
Handling, cooling, stretching, sawing, ageing. A line runs at the speed of its slowest station, and that station is usually downstream of the one everybody is looking at.
Layout drawings are static. They do not show work piling up between stations, or the handling gap that only appears once the line is at rate.
The software
Start from the customer's profile drawing and target output. The profile is checked against the die opening it would actually have to pass through, a press and billet are proposed rather than assumed, and rival configurations sit side by side — fast enough to use inside the meeting, not after it.
Temperature does not stop mattering at the die. Follow the profile station by station as it cools along the run-out, see whether the quench is reached in time and can hold the rate the press is otherwise capable of, and find the cases where cooling — not tonnage — is the real speed limit.
The full chain from billet to packing, run at station-level takt inside the same 3D scene. The constraining station identifies itself — highlighted in red, capacity against demand — and output is stated the way plants argue about it: billet in, extruded, and finished tonnes.
The customer's own profile travels the entire line in 3D at real cycle time — press, quench, saw, cooling bed, ageing, stacking, die-oven change included — on equipment models built from the real machines, fed by the same engine as Module 01 rather than a second set of estimates. What used to require a plant visit now fits on a laptop on the table between you.
Pump groups, oil routing and action timing for a hydraulic press — worked out from the loading arrangement rather than read off a fixed tonnage label. An existing schematic can be brought in and compared against the proposed configuration.
Pick the equipment, set the order, and the line lays itself out in 3D — footprint, sequence and total installed power included. An existing quotation or technical document can be dropped in and read for the fields it already contains.
Build the equipment and utility cost up from the same line configuration the simulation runs on — so the capacity conversation and the budget conversation finally happen against one set of numbers instead of two.
Thirty-plus alloys, process and die references, design decisions and Q&A — organised, searchable, and available with no connection. It sits next to the model rather than in a folder somewhere.
Seen from the software
Where it is used
Turn a vague enquiry into a defensible configuration while the customer is still in the room.
Test the layout against the output target before steel is ordered.
Runs on a laptop in a plant with no network, no install, no setup.
New engineers see how the line behaves before they ever stand next to it.
Delivery
No connection, no server, no account. It opens and it runs — including in workshops where nothing else does.
Each installation is authorised for a specific machine. Straightforward to issue, straightforward to control.
A licensed Windows build for the desk, and an authorised mobile workbench for the plant floor and the airport lounge. Same models underneath.
Every build passes several hundred automated checks against known cases before it leaves — the software is expected to give the same answer in the plant that it gave in the office.
Model coefficients, calibration data and detailed methodology are deliberately not published on this site. They are discussed under NDA, against your own measured line data.
That is enough to run a first case together and show you what the tool actually does on your product.
A drawing helps, but a rough sketch or just the profile type works too.
Your profile, your target output — through the actual software, not a slide deck.
Usually within one working day. You keep the findings either way.