Learning Forum

[suraj9735]

Hello Everyone!

I am trying to model an impressive design of Cartridge heater layout to obtain a very uniform temperature throughout my heating plate.

But I am confused about how to model it. What boundary condition should I put to represent the actual model in reality?

I would like to explain first, How electric heating works in my case to heat a plate (Injection mold). Suppose I want a particular area (Cavity) at 180 deg. temperature. For that, we use Cartridge heater, PID controller, Thermocouple (temperature sensor). The controller makes the power on and off if the sensor hit the lower and upper limit of temperature respectively.

I attached my model (ANSYS 18.1), Please find it and request you to answer my question.

1) I use constant temperature boundary condition at 180 deg to Cavity and Core heater surface to represent Cartridge heating with the controller and sensor. Is this correct or should I use another type of boundary condition?

Thank You!

 

[Karthik R]

Hello Suraj,

Unfortunately, I could not find anything on modeling cartridge heaters for injection molding directly using PID controllers in ANSYS. Perhaps, there might be something in literature that could help you directly. However, I found this very nice conference paper that talks about using PID controller for another application - gravity separator. The authors implemented PID controller on ANSYS Fluent for this purpose.

You could potentially do the same. Once you have a working PID controller model, you might want to simply solve solid conduction model on ANSYS Fluent to estimate the temperature history in your application.

I hope this provides some information to get you started with the problem.

Thank you.

Best Regards,

Karthik

[peteroznewman]

Hello Suraj,

This post includes a link to a blog that describes a PID controller for a Thermal model in the Mechanical application.

Regards,

Peter