The quality of plastic parts produced through injection molding depends on many factors. Especially during the filling stage, defects such as weld lines, burrs, or insufficient filling can occur. Numerical methods need to be employed to improve product quality by means of predicting and simulating the injection molding process. In the current work, a highly viscous incompressible non-isothermal two-phase flow is simulated, which takes place during the cavity filling. The injected melt exhibits a shear-thinning behavior, which is described by the Carreau-WLF model. Besides that, a novel discretization method is used in the context of 4D simplex space-time grids [2]. This method allows for local temporal refinement in the vicinity of, e.g., the evolving front of the melt [10]. Utilizing such an adaptive refinement can lead to locally improved numerical accuracy while maintaining the highest possible computational efficiency in the remaining of the domain. For demonstration purposes, a set of 2D and 3D benchmark cases, that involve the filling of various cavities with a distributor, are presented.

<div class="section abstract"><div class="htmlview paragraph">A new CFD simulation model and methodology for oil jet piston cooling has been developed using the modern level set approach. In contrast to the widely used volume of fluid (VOF) method, the level set approach explicitly tracks the interface surface between oil and air, using an additional field equation. The method has been extensively tested on two- and three-dimensional examples using results from literature for comparison. Furthermore, several applications of oil jet piston cooling on Ford engines have been investigated and demonstrated. For example, three-dimensional simulations of piston cooling nozzle jets on a diesel engine have been calculated and compared to test-rig measurements. Laminar jets, as well as jets with droplets and fully atomized jets, have been simulated using realistic material properties, surface tension, and gravity. Simulations of cooling jets on the undercrown of a gasoline piston and on a moving piston with a cooling gallery have been investigated and compared to test-rig measurements. Results of a VOF model with the CFD software STAR-CCM+ used in the Ford CAE workflow have been compared to the new level set method. Despite using different computational approaches (level set versus volume of fluid method), the results are similar for laminar jets. Differences occur for semi-turbulent and atomized oil jets with many droplets, which need highly resolved meshes. All in all, the modern CFD tools are a powerful way for investigating active cooling strategies for pistons in order to improve the efficiency of internal combustion engines and to reduce emissions.</div></div>

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