Material saving and product quality improvement with the visualization of hot runner design in injection molding

Abstract

Runner system plays a very important role in injection molding process. A quality runner design is helpful in improving product qualities and saving material. However, traditional cold runner systems have certain inherent issues. Moreover, poor product cosmetics are commonly seen with the use of traditional cold runners. As a result, hot runner technology has been widely applied. On the other hand, It has been one of the green molding solutions for material/energy saving and clean environments. But the mechanism behind the hot runner system is too complicated to be fully understood. There exist some critical issues currently. As a result, the simulation technolgy is highly needed to examine hot runner designs before the real manufacturing. Through simulation analyses, designers and manufafctuers are able to catch the potential issues on their hot runner systems and revise their designs. Hot runner simulation technology helps with the investigations into the behavior in hot runner system. In this paper, a true 3D numerical method is proposed and applied to investigate the temperature behavior in a real hot runner system for PC material. The experiment is conducted and the simulating result is compared with that from the experiment for the validation purpose.