Simulation of pressure‐ and tube‐tooling wire‐coating flows through distributed computation

This article focuses on the comparative study of annular wire‐coating flows with polymer melt materials. Different process designs are considered of pressure‐ and tube‐tooling, complementing earlier studies on individual designs. A novel mass‐balance free‐surface location technique is proposed. The polymeric materials are represented via shear‐thinning, differential viscoelastic constitutive models, taken of exponential Phan‐Thien/Tanner form. Simulations are conducted for these industrial problems through distributed parallel computation, using a semi‐implicit time‐stepping Taylor‐Galerkin/pressure‐correction algorithm. On typical field results and by comparing short‐against full‐die pressure‐tooling solutions, shear‐rates are observed to increase ten fold, while strain rates increase one hundred times. Tube‐tooling shear and extension‐rates are one quarter of those for pressure‐tooling. These findings across design options, have considerable bearing on the appropriateness of choice for the respective process involved. Parallel finite element results are generated on a homogeneous network of Intel‐chip workstations, running PVM (Parallel Vitual Machine) protocol over a Solaris operating system. Parallel timings yield practically ideal linear speed‐up over the set number of processors.