Simulation of Pressure- and Tube-tooling Wire-Coating Flows through Distributed Computation
Summary :This article focuses on the comparative study of annular wire-coating flows with polymer melt materials. Different process designs are considered of pressure- and tube-tooling, complementing earlier studies on individual designs. A novel mass-balance free-surface location technique is proposed. The polymeric materials are represented via shear-thinning, differential viscoelastic constitutive models, taken of exponential Phan-Thien/Tanner form. Simulations are conducted for these industrial problems through distributed parallel computation, using a semi-implicit time-stepping Taylor-Galerkin/pressure-correction algorithm. On typical field results and by comparing short-against full-die pressure-tooling solutions, shear-rates are observed to increase ten fold, while strain rates increase one hundred times. Tube-tooling shear and extension-rates are one quarter of those for pressure-tooling. These findings across design options, have considerable bearing on the appropriateness of choice for the respective process involved. Parallel finite element results are generated on a homogeneous network of Intel-chip workstations, running PVM (Parallel Vitual Machine) protocol over a Solaris operating system. Parallel timings yield practically ideal linear speed-up over the set number of processors.