Multi-scale thermal simulation of polymer crystallization.

Crystallization from polymer melt is one of the most fundamental phenomena of material phase transformations. The possibility of controlling crystallization kinetics is essential to achieve the proper polymer microstructure and consequently obtain the desired material properties. The main objective of the presented work is to compute crystallization kinetics of semicrystalline thermoplastics in an injection molding process with multi-scale modeling. This is done by identifying the analytical parameters needed to connect crystallization kinetics with molecular material properties and applying the analytical scheme to the numerical simulation during cooling. The numerical method, crystallization kinetics and their implementation into numerical software are described as well as the experimental data.