Finite Element Thermal Simulations for the Design of Mold Conformal Heating Channels Manufactured by 3D Printing Sand Casting for Molding of EPDM Rubber

This paper presents an application of Additive Manufacturing (AM) technology that is suitable for manufacturing molding tools with conformal heating channels to increase productivity for EPDM rubber molding. The design and the manufacturing of a molding tool by combining 3D sand printing and casting processes was analyzed. A simplified finite element thermal analysis was used to optimize the EPDM molding cycle time of an automotive hood seal. The simulation results showed that by using a mold with conformal heating channels manufactured by 3D printing sand casting, the cycle time process of EPDM can be reduced by 41.5%

A Displacement Based Analytical Model to Determine Residual Stress Components in a Finite Elastic Thin Plate with Hole-Drilling Method

International audienceIn order to measure the residual stress components in an elastic thin plate, the hole-drilling strain-gage method has been used. This method enables to determine the relation between the magnitudes and directions of the principal stresses and the strain relaxation about the hole. In the existing analytical models based on stress field, the formulations associated with the hole-drilling method are based on the assumption of an infinite plate, this may cause some errors for a finite plate and it’s difficult to validate these solutions by FE methods. Furthermore, in the composite, the displacement field is continuous but the stress field is not necessarily continuous, the displacement field based method has to be used. In the present paper an analyt-ical model based on a displacement field described by a function with coefficients to determine for a finite round thin plate is presented. The coefficients used in the displacement field are independent on the three residual stress components, and they are determined by minimization of the internal strain energy during the hole-drilling process. Once the coefficients in the dis-placement field are determined, three strains measured in three radial directions are utilized to determine the three residual stress components. The proposed analytical model can be also adapted to infinite plate by assuming that the diameter of the round plate tends to infinite

Analytical Homogenization for Honeycomb Sandwich Plates with Skin and Height Effects

International audienceNumerical modeling of honeycomb sandwich plates is too tedious and time consuming. The analytical homogenization enables to obtain an equivalent homogeneous solid and its elastic stiffness. In this paper, the skin effect is considered for the in-plane shear and torsion problems, in which the two skins are relatively rigid. Homogenization models using trigonometric function series and energy method is proposed to study the influence of the honeycomb height on these moduli. The comparison between our H-model and Abaqus 3D modeling has shown very good agreement