| EPSRC Reference: |
GR/M39510/01 |
| Title: |
ADVANCED INJECTION MOULDING TECHNOLOGIES FOR PLASTICS: COMPUTER SIMULATION WITH EXPERIMENTAL VALIDATION |
| Principal Investigator: |
Weatherill, Professor N |
| Other Investigators: |
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| Department: |
Civil Engineering |
| Organisation: |
Swansea University |
| Scheme: |
Standard Research (Pre-FEC) |
| Starts: |
28 June 1999 |
Ends: |
27 December 2002 |
Value (£): |
322,085
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| EPSRC Research Topic Classifications: |
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| EPSRC Industrial Sector Classifications: |
| Aerospace, Defence and Marine |
Manufacturing |
| Transport Systems and Vehicles |
No relevance to Underpinning Sectors |
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Summary on Grant Application Form |
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Injection moulding is a highly effective manufacturing process for plastics, but it has a number of limitations. These may be overcome by recently developed advanced moulding technologies, such as SCORIM, dual injection and gas injection. The availability of computer software to accurately simulate these processes is a key factor for their effective and economic use. Well established moulding software, based on a simplified 2-dimensional (2-d) treatment of melt flow, has been extended to simulate dual and gas injection. This is widely used and valuable, but has limitations resulting from the 2-d simplification. No simulation of SCORIM is currently available.The research at Swansea will adapt the general purpose FIDAP computational fluid dynamics package to provide fully 3-d simulations of these technologies. Fluent will provide the FIDAP package and work with Swansea. FEGS will supply the CADfix package. Cinpress, Rover, Matra BAe, Atlantic Plastics, the Wolfson Centre at Brunel and the IRC at Leeds will collaborate in providing expertise, moulding trial facilities, materials characterisation and testing. The resulting extended simulation capabilities will lead to more confident part and process design, promoting wider and more cost effective use of advanced moulding technologies, reducing development times and leading to products with improved properties.
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Key Findings |
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This information can now be found on Gateway to Research (GtR) http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk
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Potential use in non-academic contexts |
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This information can now be found on Gateway to Research (GtR) http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk
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Impacts |
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| Description |
This information can now be found on Gateway to Research (GtR) http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk |
| Summary |
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| Date Materialised |
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Sectors submitted by the Researcher |
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This information can now be found on Gateway to Research (GtR) http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk
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| Project URL: |
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| Further Information: |
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| Organisation Website: |
http://www.swan.ac.uk |