Copyright © 2012 Chunlei Ruan. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

We aim to study the behavior of polymer crystallization during cooling stage in injection molding more accurately, the multiscale model and multiscale algorithm proposed in our previous work (Ruan et al., 2012) have been extended to the 3D polymer crystallization case. Our multiscale model incorporates two distinct length scales: a coarse grid for the heat diffusion and a fine grid for the crystal morphology evolution (nucleation, growth, and impingement). Our multiscale algorithm couples the different methods on different length scales, namely, the finite volume method (FVM) on the coarse grid and the pixel coloring method on the fine grid. By using these multiscale model and multiscale algorithm, simulations for 3D polymer crystallization are carried out. Macroscopic variables, for example, temperature, relative crystallinity, as well as the microscopic structural characters, for example, crystal morphology development, and mean size of spherulites, are investigated at various cooling conditions. We also show the importance of coupling heat transfer with crystallization as well as 3D numerical studies.