Introduction

Liquid Injection Molding Simulation (LIMS) is a software tool that simulates the mold filling stage of Liquid Composite Molding (LCM) processes by modeling flow through porous media by Finite Element / Control Volume Method. It provides a simple and cost-effective way to verify and optimize the filling process design by providing a “virtual” mold filling process. This allows one to avoid or reduce the actual physical trial and error process which tends to be resource-intensive.

LIMS has been successfully used to design and simulate the intelligent or adaptive filling process that utilizes sensors mounted on the part and controllable injection hardware, either as a stand-alone program or as a simulation engine for other programs. Because of the scripting capability, various LCM process variants were successfully modeled.