In the automotive industry, injection molded components are often used due to their ability to create complex shapes and increase production volume. In order to strengthen these parts, milled or chopped fibers will often be mixed into the matrix to improve the performance of the polymer. However, the complexity of this material is also increased leading to more influence from processing parameters and material variability. Along with inclusion aspect ratio and volume fraction (VF), an important attribute of this material that affects the part stiffness and strength is fiber orientation due to the injection molding process. In this paper, a workflow is presented to predict the mechanical properties of an injection molded part using only injection molding simulation and constituent material properties to build microstructural finite element models (FEM). In collaboration with AGY, experimental tensile tests of injection molded samples of varying VFs of S-2 Glass® and Carbon fibers are used to validate this multiscale approach. First, the fiber orientation results from the injection molding simulation are used to create microstructures for validating the modulus of each material formulation. Due to the rather consistent fiber orientation in the samples, single scale microstructural tests are performed using the calibrated matrix and fiber properties to predict the non-linear stress-strain curve of the materials. The results of this study demonstrate high levels of accuracy for both the stiffness and non-linear response of short fiber reinforced polymers (SFRP) without the need to calibrate the composite material properties.
Short Fiber Filled Injection Molded Workflow with Multiscale Simulation
Sae Technical Papers
SAE WCX Digital Summit ; 2021
2021-04-06
Conference paper
English
Short Fiber Filled Injection Molded Workflow with Multiscale Simulation
British Library Conference Proceedings | 2021
|Injection-molded carbon-fiber composites
Automotive engineering | 1979
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