Towards Optimal Flow Uniformity: Stiffener Layout Design Evaluation of Injection Moulded Plastic Part

摘要

Injection moulding is an important manufacturing method for plastic parts. There are however many moulding quality defects caused by inappropriate setting of moulding process conditions, as well as the poorly designed plastic part geometry. Often, stiffeners are used in a plastic part to increase its strength. However, if the stiffeners are not designed properly, they will introduce one or more moulding quality problems, which in turn will worsen the part strength rather than increasing it. Although there have been quite a lot of researches on optimising moulding quality, it is often difficult to minimize multiple quality defects simultaneously. In this paper, we propose to employ flow uniformity as the optimisation objective to address this problem. A number of stiffener layout designs are evaluated in terms of this objective to determine the best design, where standard deviations of filling times and pressures at the extremities of the plastic part are used to measure the uniformity of flow. A simple case study is also presented to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed methodology.