Abstract
Thermal contact resistances (TCR) play an im portant role in heat transfer. TCR is therefore of significance in the simulation of injection mold ing processes where one of the factors determin ing productivity is the cooling time. Simulation software packages either consider TCR as negli gible or use a constant value based on steady- state conduction, whereas in injection molding, TCR is time-dependent. We use simulation of the injection molding process to show that using TCR values within the range obtained from steady state experiments may lead to underpre dicting cooling times by up to 15% and, hence, there is a need to use time-dependent TCR in the heat transfer simulations. Our simulation result indicates that the value of TCR also affects the frozen layer fraction in the early postfilling period.
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