Analysis of the three dimensional mold-filling process in injection molding

For the three decades, the mold-filling of injection molding process was modeled as Hele-Shaw model. However, this model can not consider the 3D effect. In this paper, numerical simulations of three dimensional mold-filling during the filling phase were performed. The governing equations were discretized by segregated finite element method, which used equal order interpolation for pressure and velocity fields. The iterative linear equation solver (JCG) was employed for the solution of the momentum and pressure equations. Flow Analysis Network (FAN) was employed for the melt front advancement. To check the validity of the numerical results, the results were compared with the experimental ones. The agreements between the experiment and the numerical results were found to be satisfactory.