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User Guide

Use this guide to learn PyExtrusion 0.19.0 from a practical, task-oriented point of view. The package now covers three related areas: production and planning, bounded analytical engineering tools, and deterministic economics.

What PyExtrusion can do

PyExtrusion can help you:

  • describe a direct extrusion press;
  • describe a profile and its extrusion conditions;
  • evaluate whether a supported process is geometrically viable;
  • calculate billet-related results, extrusion ratio, speeds, cuts and pull grouping;
  • estimate process losses and technical press time;
  • estimate real gross and net productivity;
  • plan one production order in bars, kilograms, metres or billets;
  • calculate what can be produced in a fixed press-time window;
  • calculate a user-supplied list of production orders in sequence;
  • compare the same process, planning request or production sequence across two or more presses;
  • evaluate source-traced AA6063 and AA6060 constitutive models;
  • calculate equivalent-axisymmetric mechanical baselines and bounded thermal analytical results;
  • calculate recurring production cost, material/scrap economics, tooling/development cost and sales margins;
  • work from Python, the command line or JSON.

What PyExtrusion does not do

PyExtrusion does not currently model the full reality of an extrusion plant. In particular, it does not predict or schedule:

  • die availability;
  • die caustic cleaning / soda treatment;
  • die correction or repeated trials;
  • die heating or preparation;
  • billet availability or logistics;
  • shifts, weekends or breaks;
  • operator availability;
  • maintenance or breakdowns;
  • furnace, stretcher, saw or packing bottlenecks;
  • automatic order priorities;
  • automatic order reordering;
  • automatic work allocation between presses;
  • final shaped-section, bridge-die or porthole-die force prediction;
  • production-grade exit-temperature prediction.

When PyExtrusion calculates a production sequence, the returned time is continuous technical press time only. It does not invent time between orders.

Start with installation, then follow the path that matches your task.

Production & Planning

  1. Installation and first steps
  2. Define a press
  3. Define a profile and process
  4. Trim topology and legacy migration
  5. Calculate a process
  6. Plan one production order
  7. Calculate a sequence of orders
  8. Compare presses
  9. Understand the results

Engineering

  1. Engineering overview
  2. Materials and rheology
  3. Mechanical baseline
  4. Thermal boundaries
  5. Engineering API

Economics

  1. Basic economics
  2. Economics API

For every path, also review JSON and the CLI, troubleshooting, model boundaries and the glossary as needed.