Three Dimensional Finite Element Program for Determination of Cure Level in Thick Rubber Part
The vulcanization or curing process begins in a heated mould to convert viscous uncured rubber materials into functional elastic ones. As the mechanical properties and service performances of the final products are greatly affected by the state of cure or cure level of rubbers, thus it is very crucial to use suitable time, pressure and temperature for the curing process to ensure that the desired quality of the final products are obtained. A computer program “RACE-CURE” written in standard FORTRAN code has been developed by our research team for the analysis of curing process of large rubber parts. The program is developed based on the incremental finite element formulation for three dimensional nonlinear transient heat transfer analysis coupled with cure kinetics. The RACE-CURE is tested for a test problem of curing of a large rubber block and results are compared to another two programs: ANSYS Polyflow v.14 and CFEM, a MATLAB© FEM program with capability to add curing kinetics, independently developed at our research group.