Optimization of multi-stage packing pressure profile in plastic injection molding

Abstract

Plastic injection molding (PIM) is a widely used manufacturing technology to produce plastic products. Multi-stage packing pressure profile is an attractive PIM technology for high product quality, but it is much difficult to determine it. In this paper, multi-objective optimization for minimizing the warpage and cycle time of a product is performed to determine the optimal multi-stage packing pressure profile as well as other process parameters. The numerical simulation in PIM is computationally so expensive that sequential approximate optimization is used for the process parameters optimization. Based on the numerical result, the experiment is also carried out to examine the validation of the multi-stage packing pressure profile.