Simulation of injection molding process using adaptive coupled arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian finite element and meshfree method

Abstract

An adaptive coupled finite element and meshfree method is developed in the arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian(ALE) framework for numerical simulation of injection molding proc-ess.In the proposed method the meshfree approximation is adopted in the region where the mesh is distorted to preservethe accuracy and robustness of numerical solutions from the deterioration of the mesh quality,while the finite element ap-proximation is employed in the region where the quality of the mesh is acceptable and on the boundaries where essential boundary conditions of flow problems are imposed to ensure high computational efficiency and proper imposition of the essential boundary conditions.In such a way,the respective strong points of the finite element and meshfree methods are adequately exploited while the respective weak pints of them are effectively suppressed,which makes the present method quite robust as well as efficient to some extent.The description of the mass movement and conservation of the melt polymer in the filling process is referred to the ALE referential configura-tion,accordingly the free surfaces can be accurately tracked without the need of frequent mesh updates.By virtue of adopt-ing the pressure stabilized fractional step algorithm to solve the governing equations,equal low order velocity-pressure inter-polations that violate the so-called Ladyzhenskaja-Babuska-Brezzi(LBB) condition can be conveniently used for the simu-lation.Numerical results of two typical problems are illustrated to demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method over the solely applied finite element and meshfree methods in overall performance including efficiency,accuracy as well as robust-ness and its ability for numerical simulation of free surface flow problems with variable mass bulk.