Simulation of Shrinkage and Warpage of Semi-Crystalline Thermoplastics

Today, the simulation of the injection molding process is state of the art. Besides the simulation of the manufacturing process, commercial simulation tools allow a prediction of the structural properties of the final part. Especially the complex shrinkage and warpage behavior is of interest as it significantly influences the part quality. Although modern simulation tools provide qualitatively correct results for several materials and processing conditions, significant deviations from the real component's behavior can occur for semi-crystalline thermoplastics. One underlying reason is the description on the macro scale used in these simulation tools. However, in semi-crystalline materials significant effects take place on the micro scale, e.g. crystalline superstructures that cannot be neglected. As part of a research project at IKV, investigations are carried out to improve the simulation accuracy of shrinkage and warpage. To point out differences in the accuracy of commercially available simulation tools, a reference part is computed for the materials polypropylene and polyoxymethylene. The results are validated by injection molding experiments. The shrinkage and warpage behavior is characterized by optical measuring technology. In future, models for the description of the pvT behavior of semi-crystalline thermoplastics will be implemented into the software package SpharoSim which was developed at IKV. With this software, crystallization kinetics for semi-crystalline thermoplastics can be calculated on the micro scale. With the newly implemented pvT models the calculation of shrinkage and warpage for semi-crystalline thermoplastics will be enabled on the micro scale.