Numerical Investigation on the Effect of Pressure and Temperature on the Melt Filling During Injection Molding Process

Abstract

Molding development and fabrication is costly and always involves part modification. The cost-effective pre-molding analysis is advantageous to engineer and designer prior to the mold design and before mass production. Computer-aided techniques are identified as virtuously cost-effective for pre-molding analysis. The numerical simulation analysis of the injection molding process using ANSYS FLUENT 14 was carried out in the study. The setting pressure and operating temperature were considered for investigation. Influence of these two process parameters to the injection molding process in terms of filing time, flow front advancement, velocity profile were studied. The injection molding and rheological experiments were carried out to substantiate the predictions of ANSYS FLUENT 14 in solving injection molding problems. The results revealed the system pressure is dominant to filling time, flow front advancement and velocity profile. Inversely, operating temperature only vaguely affects the current injection molding process, due to the small variations of polypropylene viscosity at temperature 185–195\({^{\circ} {\rm C}}\). The discrepancies of the simulation and experimental results were only 4.35 and 2.21% for system pressure and temperature, respectively.