Development of an advanced computer simulation technique for the modeling of rubber curing process

This research work is devoted to the development of an advanced computational technique for the simulation of the rubber curing process. The main novelty of the work is to cover the most important features that have not been addressed in the previous works. These include the use of incompatible meshes, thermal contact between rubber and mold, more accurate models for the description of the variation of rubber thermal properties with temperature and state-of-cure, use of a modified kinetic model and development of more robust auxiliary computer code. The general purpose finite element code ABAQUS has been used in conjunction with an in-house written subroutine (UMATHT) to solve the heat conduction equation and the rubber cure kinetics, simultaneously. It is used to simulate the curing process of a thick rubber article in the mold and the post-cure stage. The results were compared with experimentally measured data (temperature and state-of-cure) which confirmed the accuracy and applicability of the method.