Three Dimensional Finite Element Program for Determination of Cure Level in Thick Rubber Part

Abstract

The vulcanization or curing process begins in a heated mould to convert viscous uncured rubber materials into functional elastic ones. As the mechanical properties and service performances of the final products are greatly affected by the state of cure or cure level of rubbers, thus it is very crucial to use suitable time, pressure and temperature for the curing process to ensure that the desired quality of the final products are obtained. A computer program “RACE-CURE” written in standard FORTRAN code has been developed by our research team for the analysis of curing process of large rubber parts. The program is developed based on the incremental finite element formulation for three dimensional nonlinear transient heat transfer analysis coupled with cure kinetics. The RACE-CURE is tested for a test problem of curing of a large rubber block and results are compared to another two programs: ANSYS Polyflow v.14 and CFEM, a MATLAB© FEM program with capability to add curing kinetics, independently developed at our research group.

Effects of Rubber and Mould Temperatures on the Solid Tire Curing Process

“…In recent years, there are several studies attempted to develop mathematical models mostly based on finite element methods to simulate the curing process and predict cure levels in rubber parts [2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9]. In this work, simulations of the curing process of a solid tire, consisting of three layers of different rubber compounds, are performed and the cure level distribution results are evaluated.…”

“…The simulations are carried out using the commercial finite element software ABAQUS [10] with the cure kinetics model for rubber implemented through the user subroutine UMATHT. The numerical strategies and the implementation of the user subroutine used are described in our previous work [8][9]. The effects of the mold temperature and initial temperature of the solid tire on the cure level distribution and cure time are investigated.…”