A Comparative Study of Numerical Simulation Strategies in Injection Molding

Injection molding is undoubtedly one of the most widely used manufacturing process for polymers [1]. Due to its advantages over other processing techniques in terms of good surface finish, the ability to process complex parts without the need of secondary operations and low cost for mass production, injection molding has found its way into various branches of industry [2]. In order to implement process optimization a thorough understanding of the material behaviour, the filling process as well as the underlying physical phenomena is necessary. A suitable way to address this issue is the application of numerical simulation of the injection molding process. In this contribution the authors present a comparative numerical study for the mold filling of an exemplary thin-walled mold geometry. For the numerical simulation the commercial CFD software packages Cadmould 3D-F and ANSYS CFX are employed. Both software packages make use of different simulation strategies. In ANSYS CFX a threedimensional classical CFD approach is employed for the mold filling which is of course very accurate but extremely time consuming. Cadmould 3D-F pursues a generalized Hele­Shaw approximation (also known as so-called 2,5-D approach) which is due to some simplifying assumptions less accurate but also much less costly in terms of computing time [2, 5].