Predicting Solidification of Semi-Crystalline Thermoplastics during Manufacturing

Abstract

Semi-crystalline thermoplastics are often used in primary shaping manufacturing processes to produce parts of desired shapes from molten material. Solidification — initiated by cooling — is an important component of fabricating products that are usable under standard environmental conditions. The production process and the evolution of the parts’ crystalline microstructure exhibit strong mutual dependencies due to, among others, thermomechanical interactions. The commercially most significant primary manufacturing process in plastic engineering is injection molding; thus, it serves as our illustration example. Characteristic for injection molding is inhomogeneous solidification. This inhomogeneity results not only in residual stresses, but also in deviations from the desired shapes. To allow mold designers to avoid such defects, thoroughly predicting the solidification process during manufacturing is of great interest.

Consequently, we will concern ourselves with modeling and simulating the solidification of semi-crystalline thermoplastics within an isogeometric framework.