Abstract
Plastic injection molding is one of the most important and major manufacturing methods for plastic products. The process parameters in plastic injection molding affect the quality and the manufacturing cost of plastic products, and it is important to find the optimal process parameters for high quality. But finding optimal process parameters is not easy because the plastic injection molding is nonlinear phenomena. Recently plastic injection molding simulation coupled with optimization technique has attracted attention. In this paper, optimization using a sequential approximate optimization with radial basis function network is adopted to reduce the number of simulation runs. In particular, a multi-objective optimization is formulated. Therefore, both volume shrinkage and clamping force are minimized. In addition, inappropriate process parameters will easily lead to short shot that the melt plastic is not filled into the molding die. In this paper, the short shot is handled as the design constraint. The pareto-frontier is identified with a small number of simulation runs. It is noteworthy that the pareto-frontier is discontinuous. Through numerical simulation, the validity of the proposed approach is discussed.
