In recent years, the mold-opening foam injection molding technology has received great
attention as a breakthrough technology for the production of low density and open-cell
foams of three-dimensional geometries. Despite the earlier studies, there has been little
investigation on the control of the foaming temperature of this foam manufacturing
process. To help understand the mechanisms behind this technology, this paper
presents a numerical approach to simulate the cooling of the polymer/gas mixture
inside the mold cavity, and thereby, estimating the foaming temperature of this
manufacturing process. The temperature of the material inside the mold cavity prior
to the mold-opening foam expansion process was mathematically modeled and resolved
using finite difference approximation. Iteration considerations to the exothermic crystallization phenomenon for semi-crystalline polymers were also presented with reference to the non-isothermal crystallization characteristics from the differential scanning
calorimetry (DSC) analysis. The numerically simulated results were shown to agree
with the results obtained from a set of mold-opening foam injection molding
experiments.