Numerical Simulation of Temperature Changes in Rubber Compounds Flowing Through Conical Dies: an Engineering Approach

This work deals with the numerical simulation of the bulk temperature of rubber compounds flowing through conical dies in injection molding process. While this parameter is of great significance, available simulation techniques are either inaccurate in the case of simple shearing flows, or too complicated in the case ofviscoelastic models. Therefore, the necessity to couple elongational and shear flows in the calculations of theflow properties has driven several engineering approaches. Here, a simple simulation method is introduced and tested in OpenFOAM simulation package. The developed code was utilized to calculate the 3D flow properties of an industrial styrene-butadiene rubber (SBR) compound in conical dies with different conic angles. The results are further contrasted against experimental measurements in order to verify the approach.While there are still a number of challenging issues remaining, the overall tally between the simulations and experiments is satisfactory