Pultrusion heating and cooling dies

Separate the tool from its installation

A Heater or Cooler record owns contact length, width, body thickness, thermal control, body temperature or signed surface heat flux, and contact conductance. It also stores manufacturer, part number, specification source, body material, surface finish material and finish details. The thermal case links that record and owns its Upper or Lower placement and enabled state. Multiple placements can share one record; duplicate the hardware when its settings should vary independently.

Equipment is below Geometry in the fixed workflow. Rollers remain Geometry records. A heating die is a Heater installation and a cooling die is a Cooler installation. These are rectangular thermal-contact bodies; their name does not add die-cavity geometry, resin-flow or pulling-force physics.

Locate contact from the inlet surface

The Live Process origin is the width centre of the inlet upper surface. Positive x follows travel, y spans width and z is normal to the upper surface. Tool x is its centre; a tool of contact length L covers x minus L/2 to x plus L/2. Upper contact is at z = 0; lower contact is at minus the laminate thickness. Tools remain centred across the width. Seat them on the surface using the grid and snap controls. A lifted tool contributes no contact heat.

Choose Contact equipment on the appropriate boundary and link or place the tool. The active footprint is determined by the seated body, not by changing the composite to a prescribed temperature. Dragging the tool changes its installation; double-clicking opens the linked hardware record. Select Upper or Lower to see that domain's markers and click a marker to find its table row.

Finite contact exchange

For prescribed tool temperature, heat flows into the composite according to the difference between tool temperature and the current solved surface temperature:

q″ = h_c (T_die − T_surface)

Here q″ is inward heat flux in W/m², h_c is contact conductance in W/(m² K), and temperatures may be in °C when used as a difference. A 150°C die does not instantly impose 150°C on every ply. The material surface and core may lag the tool; enabled cure exotherm can also raise the material above a setpoint. A lower die setpoint removes heat when the surface is hotter than the tool.

Surface heat flux instead prescribes q″ directly: positive adds heat and negative removes it. Do not interpret this mode as temperature control or a prediction of electrical heater power. Contact width smaller than the part width is averaged over the modelled width, with the uncovered portion retaining its background condition. Same-side overlapping seated contact bodies are rejected rather than counted twice.

Convert line position to residence time

At constant speed v, elapsed residence time is x/v. If x is in metres and v is in m/min, time is in minutes. Each contact edge becomes a boundary event in the thermal integration. Step rows hold their value until the next station; Ramp rows interpolate eligible boundary values. The example dies use explicit constant intervals so a cooling region cannot be swallowed by the preceding hot zone.

Both faces use separate die installations, a 300 mm illustrative width and 500 W/(m² K) contact conductance. Initial material temperature is 23°C. These editable teaching settings are not qualified production recipes. Use Review library updates to replace old examples and dependencies without overwriting custom work.

Evaluate the process and its limits

Run the active simulation, then compare surface and core temperatures, through-thickness gradients, cure state and reaction heat against axial position. Change pulling speed, contact length, conductance or setpoint one at a time. Review the connected laminate and its cure, viscosity and modulus models before interpreting a process-to-structure transfer. Quality outputs exist only for enabled compatible models; a cured-looking temperature plot does not prove impregnation or low void content.

The moving-section thermal model resolves through-thickness conduction and enabled reaction sources. It excludes axial conduction, die thermal mass and internal temperature gradients, coolant circuits, feedback control, die friction, pulling load and general resin flow. Body and finish material selections document the tool; they do not derive contact conductance or solve heat storage in the die. A prescribed tool temperature represents a controlled boundary. Predicting die warm-up or repeated-pass die temperature requires a separate conjugate tool model.

Open the multi-zone pultrusion exercise · Follow the Equipment workflow