Numerical simulation of 3D plastic injection molding via GLS/SUPG

In order to solve the speed, pressure, temperature stably and advance melt front exactly in the simulation during filling stage of 3D plastic injection molding, the GLS (Galerkin/least-squares) formulation was employed to prevent the potential numerical instabilities, thus resulting in the symmetric and stabilized finite element integration formulations using equal-order interpolation functions for velocity and pressure. SUPG (streamline-upwind/Petrov-Galerkin) formulation was applied to avoid oscillations due to convection term of the energy equation. Several numerical examples were studied and the developed algorithms were shown to perform stably when different mesh densities were used and give accurate results compared with experimental data in a reference and the well-known commercial software Moldflow.