Gas-Assisted Mold Temperature Control for Double-Sided Heating and Micro-Structures Molding

Abstract

In this study, a gas-assisted heating system for mold surface temperature control was established. Two gap size control modes (A and B) of the gas channel and the heating results of both cavity and core sides were investigated. The results show that the mold temperature difference on the gas inlet of core and cavity surface can be reduced from 39.8°C to 1.4°C under 5 mm gap size with B mode. A case study of micro-molding for double sides 0.4 mm thin wall plate with micro-dot arrays shows that replication accuracies reach higher than 90%when molding at a mold temperature of 150°C. This is an improvement of 25.3% over injection molding at the regular mold temperature of 90°C.