Analysis of Additive Alignment in a 90∘ Elbow Channel

Short-fiber reinforced polymer composites have been widely used in industrial applications due to high strength-to-weight ratio, versatile manufacturing process, and etc. The alignment of fiber type additives plays an important role in the mechanical properties of a composite material. In this paper, an injection molding process was imitated with a liquid polymer composite flow inside a [Formula: see text] elbow channel. We performed a flow visualization experiment and analyzed the additive alignment of carbon fiber flowing in the polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) medium. By analyzing the flow visualization images, the angle changes at the corner region of the elbow channel were calculated. At the corner region, the change of passage direction leads to the change of fiber orientation. It was observed that near to the convex region, fibers have angle change values larger than the fibers traveling near to the concave region.