Patent ID: 7664623

Claim:
A method of simulating a manufacturing process of shapeable materials using a finite element analysis (FEA), the method comprising: (a) receiving, in a computer having a FEA application module installed thereon, definitions of the machinery and the shapeable materials to be manufactured in the machinery; (b) creating a FEA model representing the shapeable materials, the FEA model contains a rectangular mesh having N columns and M rows of substantially similar sized active shell elements, wherein the rectangular mesh represents a particular section of the shapeable materials of interest in the machinery; (c) defining a sink and a source as respective boundaries of the rectangular mesh; (d) creating a column of inactive shell elements to connect the sink and the source such that the rectangular mesh becomes a continuously looping mesh; (e) updating a simulation time and calculating a solution at the simulation time in the FEA; (f) when said particular section in said simulating of the manufacturing process has traveled more than a pre-defined distance in the FEA, performing an element rotation operation between the active and the inactive shell elements at the sink and the source; and (g) repeating (e)-(f) until the solution of the FEA has reached a steady state showing a result of said simulating the manufacturing process to be used for assisting a user to make a decision in improvement of the manufacturing process.