Impact of Boundary Heat Losses on Frontal Polymerization.

Considered as a faster and energy-efficient alternative to conventional manufacturing techniques for thermosetting polymers and composites, Frontal Polymerization (FP) is built on a thermal equilibrium between the heat generated by the exothermic reaction of the resin system and the heat consumed by the advancing front. However, a heat loss to the surrounding may disrupt this thermal equilibrium, slow down and possibly quench the front. This paper investigates the impact of two types of heat loss to the surrounding on the key characteristics (propagation speed and maximum temperature) of the polymerization front: convective heat loss along of the boundary of the reaction channel, and contact heat loss at channel-tool plate interfaces. The analysis is performed numerically using a nonlinear, adaptive fully-coupled nite element solver.

[1]  J. Pojman,et al.  Frontal Polymerization in Solution , 1996 .

[2]  D. Golovaty,et al.  The effect of phase change materials on the frontal polymerization of a triacrylate , 2010 .

[3]  Nancy R. Sottos,et al.  Rapid energy-efficient manufacturing of polymers and composites via frontal polymerization , 2018, Nature.

[4]  Guang Yang,et al.  Curing Kinetics and Mechanical Properties of endo-Dicyclopentadiene Synthesized Using Different Grubbs' Catalysts , 2014 .

[5]  Elyas Goli,et al.  Frontal Polymerization of Dicyclopentadiene: A Numerical Study. , 2018, The journal of physical chemistry. B.

[6]  V. Volpert,et al.  Nonlinear Dynamics of Frontal Polymerization with Autoacceleration , 2005 .

[7]  M. Garbey,et al.  A New Parallel Solver for the Nonperiodic Incompressible Navier-Stokes Equations with a Fourier Method , 1998 .

[8]  V. Volpert,et al.  Mathematical modeling of thiol-ene frontal polymerization , 2006 .

[9]  D. Keyes,et al.  Jacobian-free Newton-Krylov methods: a survey of approaches and applications , 2004 .

[10]  V. Volpert,et al.  Mathematical Modeling of Free-Radical Polymerization Fronts , 1997 .

[11]  Dmitry Golovaty,et al.  On Step-Function Reaction Kinetics Model in the Absence of Material Diffusion , 2007, SIAM J. Appl. Math..

[12]  Dave A. May,et al.  A scalable, matrix-free multigrid preconditioner for finite element discretizations of heterogeneous Stokes flow , 2015 .

[13]  J. Pojman,et al.  Free-Radical Frontal Polymerization: Self-Propagating Thermal Reaction Waves , 1996 .

[14]  Derek Gaston,et al.  MOOSE: A parallel computational framework for coupled systems of nonlinear equations , 2009 .

[15]  Nancy R. Sottos,et al.  Frontal polymerization of unidirectional carbon-fiber-reinforced composites , 2020 .

[16]  Philippe H. Geubelle,et al.  Manufacturing of unidirectional glass-fiber-reinforced composites via frontal polymerization: A numerical study , 2019, Composites Science and Technology.

[17]  D. Golovaty,et al.  A numerical study of one-step models of polymerization: Frontal versus bulk mode , 2005 .

[18]  Philippe H. Geubelle,et al.  Frontal polymerization accelerated by continuous conductive elements , 2018, Journal of Applied Polymer Science.

[19]  Jose Maria Kenny,et al.  Numerical modeling and experimental study of the frontal polymerization of the diglycidyl ether of bisphenol A/diethylenetriamine epoxy system , 2005 .