To whom it may concern:

Currently I'm working as a design engineer for extrusion profile dies.
We are designing around 120 dies per year , based only on tribal knowledge.

I'm interested on sharing and testing my designs and daily results in order to validate the open foam software.

Regards

Dear Paola,

I've been working on the simulation of extrusion dies for nearly 10 years, and with the help of OpenFOAM® for more than four years.

I'm doing the software development stuff, for example customization of OpenFOAM® solvers or automization of pre- and postprocessing activities.

I'm very interested in your die designs, it would be nice if you could provide some CAD geometries. From my side I can provide non-newtonian material models, solver customizations, post processing hints etc.

Best regards

Martin

Thank you for your prompt response Martin

my husband CARLOS and I,are working on putting together a collection of professional memories and data regarding our experience on polymer processing.


we definitely would like to start working with you sharing information.

we also would like to have a conversation with you in order to get organized.

Please let me know the most appropriated way , time and date to contact you, (e.g. skype, messenger, etc)

We live in ontario california, near los angeles.

During this conversation we can go over the next questions:

- Detail explanation of current design activities
- types of materials
- type of machinery
- how to get up to speed with openfoam software
- more information about what you are doing and your expectation with the project and activities related to us.

Regards

Paola and Carlos

Hi Paola, hi Carlos,

I'm situated in Germany, so I think it's 9 hours ahead of your time.

We can try skype, I think. I send you my contact data via board mail. Feel free to contact me whenever you see me online

Best regards

Martin

Dear Paola, Carlos and Martin,

After a few days away from the computer, I was really surprised with your messages. This kind of contacts was my main objective behind the creation of the “Polymer Processing” group.

First of all let me introduce myself, I’m a professor at the University of Minho (Portugal) in the Polymer Engineering department, where I work since 2000.

At that time, I came to the university to work on the development of computational tools to aid the design of forming tools (extrusion dies and calibrators), used in the production of thermoplastic profiles. Since then, I developed a number of in-house codes and procedures for the automatic design of both tools (extrusion dies and calibrators) and performed some experimental assessment. In fact, that was the main topic my PhD thesis and of some papers I’ve been publishing on this subject. I can obviously provide you a copy of them, if you are interested.

The main limitation of the codes I have developed until now is the employment of structured meshes, that difficult to work with complex geometries. Therefore, by the beginning of the year, I have started the development of a new numerical code that allows circumventing this limitation. Recently, I came across OpenFOAM® and was considering using it as a starting point for these new developments, since most of the capabilities I require seemed already available.

With the purpose of evaluating this possibility, last week travelled to Darmstadt to attend the 7th OpenFOAM® workshop. There, I realized that OpenFOAM® is the way to go, besides having the chance of meeting Martin.

Thus, I’ll start learning how to use OpenFOAM® and adapt the tools I developed for the design of forming tools. I know it will take a while, but it is worth the effort.


As conclusion, I’m obviously interested in the proposed and possible cooperation, that doesn’t have to be limited to experimental assessment. Please note that besides this numerical approach, at my university there are good experimental facilities, both for processing (extrusion and others) and material characterisation.

Hope to hear from you soon,

Miguel

Dear Miguel,

it's a pity that we did not have the chance for a longer meeting at the OpenFOAM® workshop.

I came across your papers on the calibrator a few weeks ago and I thought: that's a pretty complete investigation with no important information dropped! (Other authors omit important pieces of information quite often...) It should be easy to re-implement it in OpenFOAM®. If you are still interested in the calibrator stuff I can build it together again. For example OpenFOAM® is missing the contact resistance for heat transfer or the external radiative heat loss. And the existing chtMultiRegionSimpleFoam solver must be customized to handle two solids, one of them moving. It can be done in just a couple of hours with OpenFOAM®!

The simple calibrator design is a nice example for automization with the help of OpenFOAM®'s blockMesh utility. With the help of a small script perfect hexahedral meshes can be generated in a few seconds. It's easy to investigate the influence of mesh density, calibrator dimensions etc.

In any case I can assure, that your choice of OpenFOAM® as a development platform is an excellent choice.

Best regards

Martin