Cooling injection molding analysis

The term computer-aided engineering (CAE) describes the use of computers for analysis of a particular design. Often the design is a new product, but in the context of plastics it could be a cooling circuit layout for an injection mold or even the mold itself. Frequently, the term CAE is used to embrace both CAM and CAD though, strictly speaking, it refers to the analysis stage only. There are many types of analyses available these days. Typical examples include... 

TABLE 11.4 Data Needed for Injection-Molding Simulation—Advanced Mold Filling, Packing, and Cooling Analysis of Thermoplastics and Thermoplastic Elastomers ... 

Analysis of extruded and injection molded iPP shows that a skin-core structure is formed due to high shear and thermal gradients upon cooling. These frozen-in tensile stresses in the skin can act as the stress component in the environmental stress cracking process [4]. In injection moldings, molecular weight has a secondary effect. This effect is that residual orientation in the direction of flow increases with higher... 

As has been mentioned in Sect. 7.3, the continuous injection-molding operation results in a cyclic heat transfer behavior in the mold, after a short transient period. The cycle-averaged temperature can be represented by a steady state heat conduction equation, i.e., Eq. 7.10. The mold cooling analysis can be greatly simplihed by solving the steady state problem. The boundary integral equation of ( 7.10) is... 

Park SJ, Kwon TH (1998) Thermal and design Sensitivity analysis cooling system of injection mold. Part 1 thermal analysis. J Manufact Sci Eng 120 287-295 Patankar SV (1980) Numerical heat transfer and fluid flow. McGraw-Hill, New York Pearson JRA (1966) Mechanical Principles of Polymer Melt Processing. Pergamon Press, Oxford Pearson JRA, Petrie CIS (1968) On the melt flow instability of extruded polymers. In Wetton RE, Whorlow RW (eds) Polymer systems deformation and Flow. Macmillan, London, pp 163-187... 

Zhou H, Li DQ (2004) Modeling and prediction of weld line location and properties based on injection molding simulation. Int J Mater Prod Technol 21 526-538 Zhou H, Zhang Y, Wen J, Li DQ (2009) An acceleration method for the BEM-based cooling simulation of injection molding. Engineering Analysis with Boundary Elements 33 1022-1030... 

MOLD COOLING ANALYSIS FOR INJECTION MOLDING PROCESS USING FAST MULTIPOLE METHOD... 

Koo, B. H., Choi, K. 1., 2004, Three-Dimensional Mold Cooling Analysis for Injection Molding Process , ANTEC 2004... 

Dimensionless analysis is a powerfiil tool in analyzing the transient heat transfer and flow processes accompanying melt flow in an injection mold or cooling in blown film,to quote a couple of examples. However, because of the nature of non-Newtonian polymer melt flow the dimensionless mmibers used to describe flow and heat transfer processes of Newtonian flnids have to be modified for polymer melts. This paper describes how an easily applicable equation for the cooling of melt in a spiral flow in injection molds has been derived on the basis of modified dimensionless numbers and verified by experiments. Analyzing the air gap dynamics in extrusion coating is another application of dimensional analysis. 

In this work, a numerical solver based on Finite Volume Method (FVM) is developed to solve the governing equations. The solver has been successfully applied in injection molding filling simulation [2]. Numerical experiments confirm the reliability and efficiency of the solver. Currently the proposed solver can handle tetra, hexa, prism, pyramid, and mixing elements. Prism layer element can also be used for analysis to improve thermal boundary resolution while without extensive refining of mesh. This is valuable in mold cooling analysis that may involve millions of elements. 

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