Simulation and Experimental Measurement of Liquid Crystal Polymer Orientation During Injection Molding

Abstract

AbstractLiquid crystal polymers (LCP’s) comprise a class of materials that derive desirable, but anisotropic, engineering properties from long-range molecular ordering. The ability to model the polymer texture is essential to the design of manufacturing processes for isotropic material production. Previous efforts to model LCP directionality have been primarily restricted to structured grids and simple geometries that demonstrate the underlying theory, but fall short of simulating realistic manufacturing geometries. In this investigation, a practical methodology is proposed to simulate the director field in full-scale melt-processing domains and wide-angle x-ray scattering (WAXS) is used to experimentally validate modeling results. It is shown that the model generates good agreement with experimental measurements of both the orientation state and degree of order.