Abstract This paper presents an experimental and numerical study on the hybrid process of polymer injection forming (PIF) developed to manufacture sheet metal-polymer structures in one single operation. Despite the wide potential application of the PIF process, several challenges have prevented conducting an in-depth analysis of the simultaneous injection/forming condition that occurs during this hybrid process. One such challenge is the lack of a special feature in the regular injection molding machine for an independent application and control of the blank holder force (BHF) from the preset clamping force. To enable such, a new concept-to-design tool is proposed in this work. Using this specialized setup, the influence of the BHF, injection rate and their interactions are experimentally determined focusing on the transient PIF process variables and the quality of the final hybrid product. The use of the fluid-structure interaction (SFI) method to perform a multi-physics simulation on the PIF process incurs such computational costs that it is unreasonable to conduct multiple simulations to investigate the effects of several process parameters and their interactions. To achieve both efficiency and accuracy, a new combined analytical-numerical approach is presented to enable fundamental understanding of the PIF process physics considering the interaction of filling, stretching and drawing mechanisms. The feasibility of the proposed numerical and experimental methodologies is demonstrated through a comparative analysis of the deformation of the AA1100 sheet during the injection of a Polypropylene compound with different injection rates and BHF settings.

中文翻译：

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使用概念工具设计和分析-数值建模分析制造钣金-聚合物结构的混合工艺

摘要 本文介绍了聚合物注射成型 (PIF) 混合工艺的实验和数值研究，该工艺用于在一次操作中制造金属板-聚合物结构。尽管 PIF 工艺具有广泛的潜在应用，但一些挑战阻碍了对该混合工艺期间发生的同时注射/成型条件进行深入分析。此类挑战之一是常规注塑机缺乏用于独立应用和控制来自预设锁模力的压边力 (BHF) 的特殊功能。为了实现这一点，在这项工作中提出了一种新的概念到设计工具。使用这种专门的设置，BHF 的影响，注入速率及其相互作用是通过实验确定的，重点是瞬态 PIF 过程变量和最终混合产品的质量。使用流固耦合 (SFI) 方法对 PIF 过程执行多物理场模拟会产生如此大的计算成本，以至于进行多次模拟以研究多个过程参数及其相互作用的影响是不合理的。为了同时实现效率和准确性，提出了一种新的分析-数值组合方法，以便在考虑填充、拉伸和拉伸机制的相互作用的情况下对 PIF 过程物理进行基本的理解。