Multiscale modelling of microstructure formation in polymerc asting

Abstract

A data bank approach to multi-scale modelling of polymer solidification under flow and holding conditions is presented with applications to injection molding. The latent heat of solidification, which acts as an input parameter for large scale simulations, is determined as a function of different process dependent parameters such as the flow speed, supersaturation and geometric properties including the seed density of emerging spherulitic microstructures. Supersaturation and flow velocities are obtained from the larger scale simulation code as input values as function of which the released latent heat can be obtained from the pre-computed data bank thereby offering a possibility to circumvent the spatial and temporal coarse-graining problem associated with large scale simulations.