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

Bulk Moulding Compounds (BMC’s) are short fibre reinforced polymer composites that behave, during their forming, as concentrated fibre suspensions. Their suspending fluid is also a concentrated granular suspension made up of the polymer filled with mineral fillers. In this work, a method is proposed to model their flow. Firstly, the rheology of an industrial BMC was analysed by performing two types of mechanical tests, i.e. lubricated simple and plane strain compression experiments. Experimental results underline the roles of the current strain, the strain rate as well as the mechanical loading on the rheology of the BMC. Secondly, a 3D tensorial rheological model is proposed to reproduce the simple and plane strain compression experiments. Then this model is implemented into a Finite Element code dedicated to the simulation of compression moulding. Simulation results are finally compared with experiments achieved with rather complex flow situations.