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Grapplings with the simulation of non‐Newtonian flows in polymer processing
Author(s) -
Shen ShanFu
Publication year - 1992
Publication title -
international journal for numerical methods in engineering
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.421
H-Index - 168
eISSN - 1097-0207
pISSN - 0029-5981
DOI - 10.1002/nme.1620340302
Subject(s) - thermosetting polymer , rheology , injection moulding , materials science , solid mechanics , mechanics , mechanical engineering , computer science , composite material , engineering , physics
In computational mechanics, flow simulation of polymer processing not only must deal with exotic constitutive behaviour and complex geometry, but often faces the presence of moving free boundaries. The cavity‐filling of injection moulding, treated as a Stefan problem, could be better attacked, computationally, by a fixed‐domain approach after a Baiocchi transformation. For thermosetting materials, modelling the rheology and the chemical reaction needs the kinematics in the meniscus region behind the moving front. The fluid mechanics, however, touches on the unresolved question of the moving contact point, fundamental to wetting phenomena. Aspects of particular interest to polymer processing are reviewed. In spite of the imperfections, the simulation of the ASTM standard ‘spiral‐mould test’ for thermosets has recently proved promising as an inverse problem to characterize the rheology of a commercial fast‐reacting thermosetting material. The key was to match the simulation only to portions of the data that were least influenced by the uncertainties.