Transport equation with boundary conditions for free surface localization

Summary.

During the filling stage of an injection moulding process, which consists in casting a melt polymer in order to manufacture plastic pieces, the free interface between polymer and air has to be precisely described. We set this interface as a zero level set of an unknown function. This function satisfies a transport equation with boundary conditions, where the velocity field has few regularity properties.

In a first part, we obtain existence and uniqueness result for these equations, under weaker regularity assumptions than C. Bardos [Bar70], and C. Bardos, Y. Leroux and J.C. Nedelec [BLN79] in previous articles, but stronger assumptions than R.J. DiPerna and P.L. Lions [DL89b] who studied the case without boundary condition. We also study some regularity properties of the interface.

A second part is devoted to an application to injection molding of melt polymer. We give a numerical experiment which shows that our method leads to an accurate localization of interface, which is robust, since it easily handles changes of topology of the free interface, as bubble formation or fusion of two fronts of melt polymer.