Industrial-Scale Viscoelastic Injection Molding Simulation with SIGMASOFT Virtual Molding

  • Wagner, Andreas (MAGMA Gießereitechnologie GmbH)
  • Pauli, Lutz (MAGMA Gießereitechnologie GmbH)

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During the last decades, numerical algorithms for viscoelastic flow models have matured substantially. Nevertheless, industrial-scale flow simulation for polymer processing, and especially for injection molding, is rarely analyzed using viscoelastic flow models. The main reasons for this are numerical stability at high Weissenberg numbers and the increasing computational complexity. We present the CFD workflow in SIGMASOFT Virtual Molding, which has been designed to simulate industrial-scale injection molding processes with viscoelastic flow models in a robust and efficient manner. The new modeling capabilities aim to push the state-of-the-art in injection molding simulation by incorporating important physical phenomena like stress relaxation and normal stress differences opposed to pure shear stresses. We will introduce numerical modeling for multi-mode viscoelastic liquids and fully automatic parameter calibration from standard data. Next, we will show results of classical benchmarks for validation purposes, and finally, we present challenging real world examples with relevance for the injection molding industry.