PNNL

Abstract

Recently, long-fiber filled thermoplastics have become a great interest to the automotive industry since these materials offer much better property performance (e.g. elastic moduli, strength, durability…) than their short-fiber analogues, and they can be processed through injection molding with some specific tool design. However, in order that long-fiber thermoplastic injection molded composites can be used efficiently for automotive applications, there is a tremendous need to develop process and constitutive models as well as computational tools to predict the microstructure of the as-formed composite, and its resulting properties and macroscopic responses from processing to the final product. The microstructure and properties of such a composite are governed by i) flow-induced fiber orientation, ii) fiber breakage during injection molding, and iii) processing conditions (e,g. pressure, mold and melt temperatures, mold geometries, injection speed, etc.). This paper highlights our efforts to address these challenging issues. The work is an integrated part of a research program supported by the US Department of Energy, which includes • The development of process models for long-fiber filled thermoplastics, • The construction of an interface between process modeling and property prediction as well as the development of new constitutive models to perform linear and nonlinear structural analyses, • Experimental characterization of model parameters and verification of the model predictions.