AN ANALYSIS OF MOLDING AND CURING OF SMC BY THE FINITE ELEMENT METHOD

A thermo-viscoplastic finite element program was developed to analyze the compression molding of SMC process. Deformation of the material was modelled by using the flow-rule. Heat balance during the process was coupled to the deformation. In the cure study, a kinetic model was adopted to describe the cure behavior. The numerical kinetic model was integrated with the thermo-viscoplastic numerical analysis by adding heat generation due to the chemical reaction of the workpiece in the heat transfer analysis. The integrated finite element program can simulate a whole sequential molding process including deformation, heat transfer, and chemical reaction. A practical SMC molding process with T-shaped substructure was simulated. The simulated results showed good agreements with experiments.