Three-Dimensional Viscoelastic Simulation for Injection/Compression Molding Based on Arbitrary Lagrangian Eulerian Description

Different from conventional injection molding (CIM), injection/compression molding (ICM) evolves boundary variation in gapwise direction. In order to describe melt flow characteristics in ICM correctly, a new material derivative based on arbitrary Lagrangian Eulerian (ALE) description was introduced to modify the material derivatives in the governing and constitutive equations. To avoid large amount of calculation and weak stability of integral numerical method, an iterative approach employing twofold iterations was proposed to decouple the interdependence between velocity, stress, and temperature. The initial values of material parameters in constitutive equations were obtained or fitted by rheological experiments. The ICM experiments for an iso-thick and a var-thick rectangular panel were carried out to validate the proposed method and find the special characteristics of ICM. In addition, the photoelastic tests on a quarter of spherical part processed by ICM were conducted to identify the relationship between residual flow-induced stress distributions and flow fields. Both simulations and experiments show that the pressure profile displays a plateau during compression, temperature decreases with time according to exponential law, large flow-induced stress originates in thick transitional region, flow start, and flow end areas, and gravity has significant effect on meltfront for thick part ICM. The good agreement between experiments and simulations indicates that the current method can properly describe the flow characteristics of ICM.