EXPERIMENTAL VALIDATION OF SHRINKAGE PREDICTIONS FOR INJECTION-MOLDEDPRODUCTS

Two injection moulding simulation codes (C-MOLD of AC Technology and V Ip of Eindhoven University) are compared with experimental results reg arding cavity pressure and product shrinkage. It turns out that the ca vity pressure profiles are only moderately well predicted by both code s. The shrinkage predictions can be considered as a post processing st ep with temperature and pressure fields as an input (the so-called the rmoelastic model). It is shown that the shrinkage predictions agree we ll with the measurements using the thermoelastic model with actual pre ssure profiles as an input. Direct simulation of product shrinkages re sulted in an overprediction of shrinkage.