Cha-Ching!

It's not pennies from heaven, but a CAE software package helps thirsty buyers get a few nickels out of vending machines.

"Ugh! The machine ate my money, again!"

How many times have you heard this exclamation when someone is trying to simply get a Coke out of a vending machine? It sometimes precedes a number of explicatives. Sometimes, it happens before a frustrated shaking of the machine in the hopes that it will turn over the can and justly complete the transaction, usually to no avail for the buyer.

But one company is out to put an end to all this frustration. Coin Acceptors Inc., also known as Coinco, designs and manufactures coin mechanisms, bill acceptors, and control systems for vending machines. These days, the company uses CAE software to analyze its products so that they work accurately and smoothly. In other words, when you want a soda, you get a soda along with the correct change.

"A combination of good design, careful analysis, and testing helps us achieve reliability as well as a tamper-proof device for our customers," says Max Molenaar, senior engineer at Coinco.

Software packages such as Moldflow Plastics Insight (MPI) help Molenaar's crew accomplish these tasks quickly. The software also helps the design team overcome a number of hurdles in the design process – most notably, designing and molding plastic parts that require close tolerances.

"Typically, coin changers are restricted in size and require small and accurate components," Molenaar says. "Designing and molding a plastic part to meet our expected criteria can be challenging."

The engineers at Coinco use MPI software to analyze each newly designed plastic part. According to Molenaar, the software has become an integral part of the overall design process. In fact, the company uses the software to perform flow and cooling analyses on each new part as a matter of policy.

Molenaar says MPI helps save time and money during design and production. The software helps optimize the design accurately at the beginning of the design cycle, thus eliminating subsequent changes. It also allows the engineers to plan and position cooling lines for the units before machining them, preventing costly and time-consuming retooling.

The up-front analysis allows the engineers to make more informed decisions. "We could have a scenario where instead of cooling the mold with water, we could opt for using beryllium copper," Molenaar says. "The software helps us save time and money because it eliminates the trial and error out of the design cycle. MPI allows us to establish a process for the production floor so operators can easily initiate the start-up process for the mold. They have a processing window ready for them."

He also says that before MPI, he and his colleagues were spending up to eight hours per model to generate meshes and clean them up using mid-plane meshing tools. By using MPI for one current project, he was able to realize savings so far of 120 man-hours. In fact, Molenaar says that modeling time is being reduced by 80 percent.

More information on MPI is available by contacting Moldflow, 430 Boston Post Rd., Wayland, MA 01778, calling (508) 358-5848, writing in 40 on our reader service card, or replying online at www.pddnet.com.