NUMERICAL-SIMULATION OF FIBER ORIENTATION IN INJECTION-MOLDING OF SHORT-FIBER-REINFORCED THERMOPLASTICS

Abstract

The present study develops a numerical simulation program to predict the transient behavior of fiber orientations together with a mold filling simulation for short-fiber-reinforced thermoplastics in arbitrary three-dimensional injection mold cavities. The Dinh-Armstrong model including an additional stress due to the existence of fibers is incorporated into the Hele-Shaw equation to result in a new pressure equation governing the filling process. The mold filling simulation is performed by solving the new pressure equation and energy equation via a finite element/finite difference method as well as evolution equations for the second-order orientation tenser via the fourth-order Runge-Kutta method. The fiber orientation tenser is determined at every layer of each element across the thickness of molded parts with appropriate tenser transformations for arbitrary three-dimensional cavity space.