An essential part of the research project is the integration of mould models and polymer material with computer simulation of the electro-hydraulic drive system.
This allows important information to be gained about performance and theoretical power consumption of the actuation system. These performance and energy consumption results have been compared with those achieved in measurements of the new machine. Up to now there are simulation programmes available that allow simulation of the hydraulics or the injection process. A combined software tool, actuation system plus process simulation, is not available. Yet, this provides much more realistic results about machine performance as it is a packaged control strategy.
The agreement of data from simulation and experiment is satisfactory, meaning the deviation between experimental and simulated data is about 10 %.