The Use of Elasto-Visco-Plastic Material Model Coupled with Pressure-Volume Thermodynamic Relationship to Simulate the Stretch Blow Molding of Polyethylene Terephthalate.

The use of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) in the stretch blow molding process presents several challenging issues due to various processing parameters and complex behavior of the material, which is both temperature and strain-rate dependent. In this paper, we generalize the G’Sell-Jonas law in 3D to model and simulate the elasto-visco-plastic (EVP) behavior of PET, taking into account strain-hardening and strain-softening. It is observed that the internal pressure (inside the preform) is significantly different from the nominal pressure (imposed in the blowing device upstream) since the internal pressure and the enclosed volume of the preform are fully coupled. In order to accurately simulate this phenomenon, a thermodynamic model was used to characterize the pressure-volume relationship (PVR). The predicted pressure evolution is thus more realistic when imposing only the machine power of the blowing device (air compressor or vacuum pump). Mechanical and temperature equilibrium equations are fully nonlinear and solved separately with implicit schemes on the current deformed configuration, which is updated at each time step. Biaxial characterization tests were used to determine the model parameters in order to simulate the stretch blow molding process using the pressure-volume thermodynamic relationship. To validate this model, thickness predictions for three industrial cases will be presented and compared to experimental measurements. © 2007 American Institute of Physics [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]