ABSTRACT
Microcellular technology has been enormously developing and applied in many foaming processes for many industrial polymer manufacturing, since the microcellular batch-processing technology was brought out by Dr. Nam Suh and coworkers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the early 1980s [1]. The microcellular application used in reciprocating screw injection molding machines was built by Trexel and Engel in 1998 [2]. Despite the fact that microcellular technology has been developing for many decades and is widely used in current plastic product manufacturing, a reliable computer-aided engineering application is not well developed due to a limited understanding of complex foaming mechanism. Venerus [3] reviewed numerous diffusion-controlled modeling studies of polymer foaming and showed the diffusion-induced bubble growth in viscoelastic liquids numerically having good agreement with experimental data. Taki [4] studied the effects of pressure release rate on bubble density and sizes. Recently, previously developed models of cell foaming have been coupled with three-dimensional (3D) flow motion technology for microcellular injection molding. However, the dynamic features of bubble growth and the integration from a bubble growth mechanism to the final injected parts are
CONTENTS
11.1 Introduction ................................................................................................363 11.2 Numerical Modeling .................................................................................364 11.3 Case Studies ................................................................................................366
