PREDICTIVE MODEL AND OPTIMIZATION OF PROCESSING PARAMETERS FOR PLASTIC INJECTION MOULDING

摘要

Injection molding is one of the most widely used processes for producing engineered parts in the plastics industry. The objective of this study is to propose a fuzzy expert system for the prediction of mechanical properties of injection-molded parts where the fuzzy system is optimized using particle-swarm optimization. The input process parameters were the mold temperature, melt temperature, injection velocity, packing pressure, cooling time and packing time. The predicted values were in good agreement with the experimental ones, which indicates that the developed particle-swarm-optimization-based fuzzy expert system can be effectively used to predict the mechanical properties of molded parts. In addition, optimization based on a particle-swarm optimization algorithm was carried out to obtain the optimum process parameters based on the objective to maximize the tensile strength of the molded product.