Simulating of a pressing process of a viscoelastic polymer melt

A well known and often used method to obtain anisotropic polymer films is the so-called pressing process. Here, films are squeezed under high temperatures, pressure and deformation rates. To simulate such a process, the polymeric matrix is treated as a non-Newtonian, viscoelastic melt. The modeling of such melts is done with the anisotropic molecule movement tensor generalization of the Maxwell Model for high deformation rates. The viscoelastic flow simulations are done with DEVSS stabilization techniques and an ALE based dynamic mesh Method. In this work we present simulations in order to show the difference between classical approaches using a generalized Newtonian viscosity to model the melt and the used viscoelastic models. (© 2012 Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)