Effect Of Injection Moulding Parameters On Warpage Deflection

• Main Author: Mohd Sani, Siti Salmah
• Format: Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: 2015
• Subjects: T Technology (General); TP Chemical technology
• Online Access: http://eprints.utem.edu.my/id/eprint/16823/; http://plh.utem.edu.my/cgi-bin/koha/opac-detail.pl?biblionumber=96252

Injection moulding is a process that can be characterised as their ability to produce high production rates with accurately product size and complex part shape. Generally, there are four elements affected the quality of injection moulded parts such as machine parameters, mould design, plastic materials and operator. In order to ensure quality of injection moulding parts can be produced at minimum cost and maximum productivity, the appropriate machine setting parameters are the priority should be achieved. Variation of process parameters are unavoidable in production of injection moulding and affected the quality of part because involved enormous process parameters. The purpose of this study is to analyze the effect of injection moulding parameters that are including cavity temperature, core temperature, mould temperature, melt temperature and cooling time. The main response of this study is to investigate the warpage deflection using simulation software and actual experimental method. The experiment was performed using injection moulding machine Arburg 420C 800-250 while simulation was done using MoldflowTM Plastic Insight (MPI) software. Design of experiment (DOE) using Taguchi method was applied to design the experimental runs and it was used to analyze the significant factors that affected the warpage deflection. Three methods of investigation work were performed in this research. First investigation work was performed by compared the deviation percentage between simulation MoldflowTM software and actual experimental method using different core and cavity mould temperature gradient. Second and third investigation works focus on optimized parameters using whole cold mould and whole hot mould where both investigation works were performed using simulation MoldflowTM software. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used as statistical tools to get the percentage of contribution for each factor and to find the interaction between parameters involved. The average deviation percentage of warpage deflection by simulation software and actual experiment for first investigation work using different mould core and cavity temperature gradient was found 12.80%. The improvement of warpage deflection between those three investigation works shows that the warpage deflection is improved at 89.53% from 0.5716mm to 0.0599mm between first and third investigation work. Meanwhile, warpage reduction between first and second investigation is 83.52% and between second and third investigation is 35.31%. Result shows that the lower differences between core and cavity temperature contributes smaller warpage deflection. On the other hand hot mould temperature controlled contributes less warpage deflection as compared to cold mould. This study proved that with appropriate control parameters in injection moulding process can produce better plastic products quality.