Design and Optimization of Plants and Components for the Production of Polyurethane Foams

Carsten Brodbeck, Bettina Landvogt

Fraunhofer Institute for Algorithms and Scientific Computing SCAI

Included in The Integration of CFD into the Product Development Process Seminar Proceedings,
4 - 5 April, 2011 Wiesbaden, Germany

A​bstract

In cooperation with a German manufacturer of polyurethane technologies, Fraunhofer Institute SCAI launched a publicly funded project with the intention to improve the development of polyurethane technologies by applying computational fluid dynamics and multi-criteria optimization methods for robust design. For this purpose SCAI employed STAR-CCM+ for fluid simulation and the in-house code DesParO for optimization. This approach was carried out for two procedures in polyurethane technology, namely the mixing of polyurethane components in high-pressure mixing chambers and the manufacturing process of foam slab-stock in conveyor belt facilities. In order to achieve an optimal mixing by minimizing applied pressure for a wide range of different polyurethane components, one has to develop well designed mixing jets, mixing chambers and chamber outlet geometries. In a script-based automated process chain effective geometric parameters were varied by a design of experiment and various simulations were carried out, which results were integrated in response surface methods to reveal parametrical dependencies. For the production of foam slab-stock the geometry of the system has a significant influence on the product quality. It is necessary to spread the polyurethane fluid evenly over a system of moving paper or plastic foils to achieve a constant product height. According to the mixing chamber procedure an automated process chain to carry out the simulations was applied here as well.