Extension of SPH to simulate non-isothermal free surface flows during the injection molding process

Abstract

• The non-isothermal injection molding process is studied by smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH). • Our SPH method can model arbitrary-shaped mold walls in injection molding. • The temperature, pressure, and velocity distributions are nicely displayed. • The effects of the operating conditions on the flow behavior are analyzed. This article presents an extension of smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) to non-isothermal free surface flows during the injection molding process . Specifically, we use the method presented by Xu and Yu, Appl. Math. Model. 48 (2017) pp. 384–409, in which the corrected kernel gradient is implemented to increase the computational accuracy and the Rusanov flux is introduced into the continuity equation to alleviate large and random pressure oscillations. To model non-isothermal free surface flows, a working SPH discretization of the temperature equation is derived. An enhanced treatment of the wall boundary is further developed, which can model arbitrary-shaped mold walls. The proposed SPH method is first validated by solving non-isothermal Couette flow and non-isothermal injection molding of a circular disc with a core and comparing the SPH results with those obtained by other numerical methods or experiments. We then extend the numerical method to non-isothermal injection molding of F-shaped and N-shaped cavities. The convergence of the method is examined with several different particle sizes. The effects of the operating conditions (e.g., injection temperature, temperature of the mold wall, and injection velocity) on the flow behavior are analyzed. All the results illustrate that the present SPH method is a powerful computational tool for simulations of non-isothermal free surface flows during the injection molding process.