Simulation of heat transfer in the progress of precision glass molding with a finite element method for chalcogenide glass

Precision glass molding (PGM) has become a viable processing method for large-volume aspheric optical elements. The optimization of a PGM process is an obstacle to the realization of mass production. The current work is focused on optimizing the process parameters to gain satisfactory surface shape. But the machining cycle time is not optimized. When setting the process route in the machine interface, going to the next step after reaching the target temperature rather than reaching the target time is usually set for the heating and cooling phase. Thus, the time to complete the heating and cooling stages of the production cycle is known only in the actual production. As for chalcogenide glass, its physical and chemical properties are greatly dependent on temperature. So, it is necessary to effectively simulate these stages to obtain the cost in time for actual production. Due to the excellent availability of numerical simulation, the rapid development of computing technology, and the increase of task scale in data and information processing, the finite element method can be applied to simulate the whole molding process. In this paper, a heat transfer model is established with the partial differential equation toolbox in MATLAB software. MSC.Marc software is used to simulate the heating stage at the same time. The numerical results are consistent, indicating that the heat transfer model established in MATLAB is, at least to a certain extent, valid. The heat transfer model needs further improvement by considering temperature-dependent properties such as viscoelasticity to make it a more effective tool for process analysis and optimization.