Lubricated compression of BMC, a concentrated and fibre-reinforced granular polymer suspension

Towards the simulation of mould filling with polymer composites reinforced with mineral fillers and short fibres

“…The tested BMC was very close to that used in [41]. It differed from this last formulation by its longer ageing time.…”

“…2, mean value ≈ 0.5 mm). They formed a complex intricate connected network where (i) no privileged orientation would be found [41] and (ii) approximately 5 to 10 fibre-fibre contacts per fibres might occur [18,33,45,55] .…”

“…The first apparatus is the simple compression rheometer initially developed for the rheology of sheet moulding compounds [20,34,41]. Tests consist in compressing lubricated cylindrical samples (initial radii R 0 = 35 mm and 55 mm, initial height h 0 = 20 mm) at constant axial average strain rates D 33 =ḣ/ h (compression direction given by the unit vector e 3 ) between two horizontal platens parallel to the (e 1 , e 2 ) plane, (e 1 , e 2 , e 3 ) being the usual orthogonal reference frame.…”

“…However, in these studies, BMC's were subjected to heterogenous deformation modes, so that it was not possible to propose suitable rheological models for these materials without a priori constitutive assumptions. More recently, Orgéas et al [41] performed an extensive experimental study of the rheology of a BMC. BMC samples were deformed using lubricated simple compression experiments, similar to those initially proposed for SMC or other planar fibre or fibre-bundle reinforced polymer composites [20,21,34].…”

“…Thus, the aim of this paper is to pursue the work that has been initiated in [41] to model mould filling with BMC. For that purpose, an industrial BMC was collected at the outlet of an industrial injection machine (Section "Material").…”