Investigation of the particle distribution in injection molding of mineral-filled polyamide using CFD simulation.

The appearance of the interior and exterior of modern cars is characterized by a variety of chromed parts. Due to the lightweight construction requirements to reduce fuel consumption or to maximize the range of electric vehicles, the use of metallic parts is adversarial. Typically, these parts are injection molded parts made of ABS or PC/ABS and subsequently electroplated. If the requirements on mechanical properties increase, mineral-filled polyamide 6 (PA6) is often used. The particles and their distribution are primarily responsible for the surface quality of the electroplated parts. Unfortunately, the rejection rate of electroplated PA6 is up to 30 %. Therefore, in this paper, the particle distribution in the boundary layer was investigated for different operating points by performing computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations using ANSYS Fluent. The simulations were executed for a microscopic section in the boundary layer and the boundary conditions were derived from a macroscopic simulation assuming continuous material properties using Sigmasoft. Particle interactions were also set using the DEM-collision-model. Significant process parameters for the particle distribution in the surface layer were determined and correlated with surface parameters from real experiments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]