The importance of process induced material properties in injection moulded SFRP: radius of curvature in L-profiles

Adding short fibres to thermoplastic materials (SFRP), improves the mechanical performance (stiffness and strength at break) of these materials. The full potential in added value for short fibre reinforced products is however seldom obtained. The reason for this is an inefficient product design due to the lack of available design rules. This causes malfunctioning products or premature failure of these composite materials. In structural simulations for SFRP, it is important to include the local material properties due to anisotropic effects. Therefore, a connection between different software packages for injection moulding simulations and structural analysis needs to be available. This paper describes the correlation between experimental data from injection moulded parts and numerical structural analysis simulation results for short fibre reinforced composite L-shaped specimens. The mechanical performance of these profiles (with different radii) is investigated by comparing experimental data with results from numerical simulations obtained with Autodesk Moldflow In-sight for the injection moulding process and Ansys 18.2 for the structural analysis. In these simulations, the internal stresses within the part, caused by the injection moulding process, are provided to the structural analysis as an initial stress state condition. The influence of the injection moulding process on the fibre orientation and internal stresses, is investigated for several types of short glass fibre composite materials with different fibre volume fractions. This approach determines the error estimate when internal stress results are combined with global material models.

ISBN:978-989-20-8809-9