Thermal Simulation of Polymer Crystallization during Post-Filling

Abstract

Crystallization from polymer melt is one of the most fundamental phenomena of material phase transformations. The possibility of controlling crystallization kinetics is essential to achieve the proper polymer microstructure and consequently obtain desired material properties, reducing undesired effects such excessive anisotropy of shrinkage, warping and insufficient dimensional stability. Due to the high transformation rate, the simulation of crystallization is fundamental to mimic this important physical phenomenon under several testing and processing conditions by using commercial software. User subroutines were developed and implemented into finite element-based model to simulate crystal growth in semicrystalline polymers with various crystal morphologies. These subroutines allowed the commercial program Abaqus to be customized for solving the Kolmogoroff-Avrami-Evans equation with Hoffmann-Lauritzen model in order to simulate the variation of the polymer crystallization degree. The micro-structural evolution in non-isothermal conditions and with different cooling rates was considered. The study was performed on isotactic PP (SABIC PP 505) for its simplicity to the measure polymer crystals. A tensile test specimen, produced by injection molding, was chosen as case study to evaluate the crystallization evolution. The paper reports the numerical and experimental results.