A Comprehensive Assessment of Commercial Process Simulation Software for Compression Moulding of Sheet Moulding Compound

Abstract

With a growing interest in the application of carbon fibre Sheet Moulding Compound (SMC), a number of commercial software packages have been developed for the simulation of compression moulding of SMC. While these packages adopt different algorithms and meshing strategies, the constitutive material model and processing control are usually adapted from injection moulding process simulation. Little has been done in the literature for assessing the capabilities of these software as design tools, and more importantly, validating the process simulation results using experimental data. This paper aims to provide an independent and comprehensive assessment of existing well-known process simulation software for SMC compression moulding. The selected software will be compared in terms of material models, and available processing settings in order to determine their robustness as a compression moulding design tool. The predictive accuracy of the software will also be assessed by comparing the compression force and filling patterns against the experimental data.

Flow Behaviour of Carbon Fibre Sheet Moulding Compound

“…The commercial models on the other hand, show poor agreement with the experimental results in terms of both the magnitude of the compression forces and the characteristic shape of the curve. It is also interesting to notice that both commercial models have predicted nonzero compression force at zero displacement, which has also been observed in [2]. Fig.…”

“…The constitutive models employed in these packages are commonly adapted from models originally developed for injection moulding of short fibre composites, but very few validation studies have been done to assess the suitability of such models for SMC compression moulding. The co-authors recently conducted a full assessment of the predictive accuracy for all three commercial packages mentioned above using both a flat plaque geometry and a 3D geometry with ribs and bosses [2]. This study found that all these simulation packages failed to correctly predict the compression forces for both geometries, and furthermore, they also failed to correctly predict the filling patterns in the 3D geometry.…”

Experimental and numerical characterisation of fibre orientation distributions in compression moulded carbon fibre SMC

“…Compression moulding process simulation in Moldex3D and 3D TIMON was setup in the same manner as described in [5]. In both packages the models were meshed using global element size was 2 mm × 2 mm × 0.5 mm, which was identical to the grid size used in the CT scan analysis.…”

“…The reason that a 1D flow regime was adopted was to eliminate the errors in fibre orientation predictions caused by incorrectly predicted flow patterns, as with most of the fibre prediction models the fibre orientation tensors were calculated from the flow vectors. A previous study conducted by the co-authors [5] assessed the accuracy of the flow solvers within several commercial compression moulding simulation packages, and it was reported that all the commercial packages investigated could only correctly predict the flow pattern for 1D flows. The mould temperatures were 145°C at the bottom (female mould half) and 140°C at the top (male mould half).…”

Development and Validation of a 1D Dynamic Model of an Injection Moulding Process and Design of a Model-Based Nozzle Pressure Controller

“…Work with simulations has continued to present day [24][25][26][27][28]. Increases in computational power resulted in commercial programs, where modelling often relies on computational fluid dynamics (CFD) [29]. These programs analyse the behaviour of the dynamic system through a meshing, which introduces a large set of equations.…”