OSUM

The OSUM project (2017-2020) aims to develop and market a design and scale change tool allowing more efficiency in the formulation and industrialization of filled elastomers. This project targets CFD simulation and elastomer manufacturing process markets. The project is divided into 6 tasks: Process simulation, material properties and its behavior, elaborate a contact law between materials, manufacturing process, developing a commercial simulation code with user interface, and finally process validation. In order to achieve these tasks 6 partners are involved in the project.
ICI’s research laboratory is responsible for the process simulation part. The main goal is to develop a new simulation code (ICI-Tech) that generates highly accurate results. In this code an accurate geometrical representation tool is developed using several meshing and numerical techniques such as immersion and adaptation to well represent complex geometry and interfaces and to take into account moving domains.
Then a highly accurate, time efficient mechanical and thermal solver is developed to simulate the mixing process after implementing all the mathematical models that represent the elastomer behavior and its movement in the mixer. Convection-diffusion and Navier-Stokes equations are solved in parallel to get temperature, pressure and velocity profiles of the mixing process. All of these parameters will help to calculate the torque needed to achieve a good compound mixing, therefore optimize the process according to these parameters.
The new ICI-tech codes will be tested on simple cases before using it for the mixing process simulations.
Published on July 26, 2018 Updated on August 27, 2018