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Driving Innovation in Polymeric Coating Materials with Integrated Process-Structural Engineering Simulations

Polymeric coating materials are essential to our daily life, and they provide numerous benefits from thermal and pressure loss protection to noise reduction. Polymer-coated textiles have found increased applications driven by rising safety regulations across different industrial sectors such as transportation and protective clothing. A fundamental understanding of the coating processes and stress states in the coated articles under the intended loading conditions is crucial to the development of novel polymeric coating materials to deliver desired performance at lower coating weight and cost for specific targeted applications. In this paper, a two-dimensional (2D) meso-scale Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) model is first discussed to simulate a so-called “knife-over-roll” coating process used for coating woven fabric. This 2D CFD model employs multi-phased Volume of Fluid (VOF) and dynamic mesh technique, and it captures well both upstream and downstream flow behavior in the coating process, showing good agreement with experimental results. This process model can be used to study the impact of coating material rheology, fabric substrate wetting properties, and coating process parameters on coating thickness, and quality. A multi-scale structural modeling approach is then presented to predict the in-use stresses in fabric coated on one side while a pressure loading is applied on the other side of the fabric. This modeling approach utilizes a meso-scale global fabric model with a seam, a three-dimensional (3D) local unit cell model, and a two-dimensional (2D) membrane unit cell model to study the global deformation and failure mechanisms, coating-fabric interfacial strain and stress, and coating rupture in inter-yarn opening, respectively. The meso-scale global model was chosen for high computation-efficiency while the two unit cell models were developed for high accuracy in the result predictions. The in-plane strain predictions from the global model were utilized to make reasonable boundary condition assumptions in the unit cell models. This in-use stress predictive modeling capability can be used for study and assess the performance of coating materials with different mechanical properties for the intended applications. This work demonstrates that integrated process and structural modeling can be used to effectively evaluate and optimize different coating materials associated with different chemistries to speed up polymeric coating material development for customized applications.

Document Details

ReferenceNWC23-0074-extendedabstract
AuthorsMa. L Xi. C Yu. M Laura. D Kotnis. A
LanguageEnglish
TypeExtended Abstract
Date 17th May 2023
OrganisationDow Chemical Company
RegionGlobal

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