Host: The Japan Society of Mechanical Engineers
Name : [in Japanese]
Date : September 25, 2019 - September 27, 2019
Rapid heating cycle molding (RHCM) that controls the mold temperature during the plastic injection molding (PIM) is a novel plastic injection molding (PIM) technology. It has been reported in the literature that weldline which has an influence on not only the appearance but also the strength of a plastic product can be reduced by using the RHCM. Although various studies on the RHCM have been conducted, many of those studies focused on the layout and diameter of the heating/cooling channel. Like the conventional PIM, the mold temperature profile as well as several process parameters such as melt temperature, injection time, packing pressure and cooling time are crucial process parameters, but they are rarely discussed in the literature. In this paper, the mold temperature profile and several process parameters in the RHCM are optimized for the weldline reduction. In addition, the cycle time is also taken into account for high productivity. Numerical simulation in the PIM is so intensive that a sequential approximate optimization that response surface is repeatedly constructed and optimized is adopted to identity the pareto-frontier between weldline reduction and short cycle time. It is found from numerical result that the trade-off between them is observed. Based on the numerical result, the experiment using the PIM machine (GL100, Sodick) is conducted to verify the proposed approach. It has been confirmed through the numerical and experimental result that the proposed approach for the RHCM is valid for simultaneously minimizing the weldline and cycle time.
