New boundary conditions for simulating the filling stage of the injection molding process
ISSN: 0264-4401
Article publication date: 13 July 2020
Issue publication date: 8 February 2021
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to develop new boundary conditions for simulating the injection molding process of polymer melts.
Design/methodology/approach
The boundary conditions are derived and implemented to simulate real-life air vents (used to allow the air escape from the mold). The simulations are performed in the computational library OpenFOAM® by considering two different fluid models, namely, Newtonian and generalized Newtonian (Bird–Carreau model).
Findings
A detailed study on the accuracy of the solver interFoam for simulating the filling stage is presented, by considering simple geometries and adaptive mesh refinement. The verified code is then used to study the three-dimensional filling of a more complex geometry.
Originality/value
The results obtained showed that the numerical method is stable and allows one to model the filling process, simulating the real injection molding process.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
This work is funded by FEDER funds through the COMPETE 2020 Programme and National Funds through FCT (Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology) under the projects UID-B/05256/2020, UID-P/05256/2020 and MOLDPRO-Aproximações multi-escala para moldação por injeção de materiais plásticos (POCI-01-0145-FEDER-016665).
The research of L.L. Ferrás was partially financed by the Portuguese Funds through FCT within the Projects UID-B/00013/2020, UID-P/00013/2020 and the scholarship SFRH/BPD/100353/2014.
The authors would like to acknowledge the Minho University Cluster (NORTE-07-0162-FEDER-000086) for providing the HPC resources that contributed to the research results reported within this paper.
Corrigendum: It has come to the attention of the publisher that the article Galuppo, W.d.C., Magalhães, A., Ferrás, L.L., Nóbrega, J.M. and Fernandes, C. (2020), “New boundary conditions for simulating the filling stage of the injection molding process”, Engineering Computations, previously omitted the supplementary material. The link of the supplementary material has now been added to the online version. The authors sincerely apologise for this.
Citation
Galuppo, W.d.C., Magalhães, A., Ferrás, L.L., Nóbrega, J.M. and Fernandes, C. (2021), "New boundary conditions for simulating the filling stage of the injection molding process", Engineering Computations, Vol. 38 No. 2, pp. 762-778. https://doi.org/10.1108/EC-04-2020-0190
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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