Morphology Evolution during Injection Molding: effect of packing pressure

Abstract

Injection molding is one of the most widely employed methods for manufacturing polymeric products. The final properties and the quality of an injection molded part are to a great extent affected by morphology. Thus, the prediction of microstructure formation is of technological importance, also for optimizing processing variables, in order to cut down on the expensive costs of tooling and the trial‐and‐error procedures. In this work, some injection molding tests were performed with the aim of studying the effects of packing pressure on morphology distribution. The resulting morphology of the moldings was in fact characterized by adopting different experimental techniques and, in order to underline the effects of holding pressure, it was compared with previous results gathered on samples obtained applying a lower holding pressure. Furthermore, the molding tests were simulated by means of a code developed at University of Salerno, which implements procedures able to model molecular orientation, crystallization kinetics and morphology evolution. The results obtained show that on increasing holding pressure the molecular orientation inside the samples increases, and simulations show that this is due mainly to the increase of relaxation time caused by the higher pressures. Furthermore, a sensible reduction of the percentage of α‐phase is found on increasing the holding pressure, whereas the percentage of mesomorphic phase increases and a small fraction of γ‐phase is found, which was not present in the samples molded at lower holding pressures.