Coupling of Mold Flow Simulations with Two-Scale Structural Mechanical Simulations for Long Fiber Reinforced Thermoplastics

The entire simulation process for long fiber reinforced thermoplastics is examined to determine the effective mechanical properties which are influenced by the microstructural fiber orientation state. Therefore, flow and fiber orientation simulations are conducted and the obtained fiber orientation tensors are used in two-scale structural simulations. The fiber orientation distributions as well as the mechanical properties are compared with micro-computed tomography data and results from threepoint bending tests performed by dynamical mechanical analysis (DMA), respectively. The validated results show that prediction of the essential mechanical properties is possible with the applied combinated methods and that the knowledge of the fiber orientation and its gradients is of crucial importance for the entire simulation process.