In our first Die Design blog post, we outlined the rich heritage of Akron Tool & Die (ATD) and the beginning of “That’s An Akron Part” – known to many in the industry as ATD’s quality and precision in die making. After purchasing the assets of Akron Extruders and rebranding as Diamond America, the organization combined manufacturing and engineering under one roof to quickly expand into other markets.

Customers often come to Diamond America with unique extrusion process challenges. Expanding into additional markets brings new challenges and even more robust customer expectations. Although there are many factors to consider when designing an extrusion solution to meet a customer’s process expectations, optimizing the velocity of flow through the die has become critical to achieve desired results.

For this reason, Diamond America invested in Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) software to support its design and engineering team along with its customers. With CFD software in-house, we can now accurately simulate flow conditions and adjust geometry to optimize them. Providing design services with the additional support of flow simulation has helped customers around the globe solve complicated die issues.

The die flow simulation helps improve and validate the best option for maintaining consistent flow with even velocities across different die geometries. This die simulation to die design methodology reduces development time and improves performance to many types of extrusion dies, including sheet, film, strand, blown film and profiles.