USING OPENFOAM TO SIMULATE THE EXTRUSION PHASE OF EXTRUSION BLOW MOLDING

Most of the thermoplastic hollow containers are manufactured by extrusion blow molding (EBM). There are only a few numerical simulation codes available for the extrusion blow molding process, and they do not allow the modelling of all the relevant phases comprised in the EBM process. The authors of this work are developing a set of computational tools aiming the numerical modelling of all the relevant phases of the EBM process, namely: parison extrusion, mold clamping, parison inflation and cooling, employing the OpenFOAM computational library. The parison extrusion phase aims the production of a tubular parison that will be inflated in the subsequent steps. During parison extrusion its thickness can be locally adjusted by the displacement of the inner mandrel movement, whose positioning profile can be programmed prior to production, a feature known as parison programming. This works presents the solver developed to simulate the extrusion phase of the extrusion blow molding process. The code is currently able to deal with the multiphase flow of viscoelastic fluids, which are the most appropriate constitutive models for polymer melts, and, resorting to the dynamic mesh capabilities of OpenFOAM, can also replicate the parison programming. The different features of the solver will be illustrated with some case studies.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT This work was funded by FEDER funds through the COMPETE 2020 Programme and National Funds through FCT - Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology under the projects UIDB/05256/2020, UIDP/05256/2020 and FAMEST - Footwear, Advanced Materials, Equipment’s and Software Technologies (POCI-01-0247-FEDER-024529). The authors also acknowledge the support of the computational clusters Search-ON2 (NORTE-07-0162-FEDER-000086) and Minho Advanced Computing Center (MACC).