Abstract
Plastics are commonly used engineering materials, and the injection-molding process is well known as an efficient and economic manufacturing technique for producing plastic parts with various shapes and complex geometries. However, there are certain manufacturing defects related to the injection-molding process, such as short shot, shrinkage, and warpage. This research aims to find optimum process parameters for high-quality end products with minimum defect possibility. The Artificial Neural Network and Taguchi Techniques are used to find a set of optimal process parameters. The Analytic Hierarchy Process is used to calculate the weight of each defect in the proposed thin-walled part. The Finite Element Analysis (FEA) using SolidWorks plastics is used to simulate the injection-molding process for polypropylene parts and validate the proposed optimal set of process parameters. Results showed the best end-product quality was achieved at a filling time of 1 s, cooling time of 3 s, pressure-holding time of 3 s, and melt temperature of 230 °C. The end-product quality was mostly influenced by filling time, followed by the pressure-holding time. It was found that the margin of error for the proposed optimization methods was 1.5%, resulting from any uncontrollable parameters affecting the injection-molding process.
Highlights
Plastics offer a wide range of advanced mechanical properties such as high strength-toweight ratio, flexibility, corrosion resistance, transparency, etc., which make them irreplaceable materials in various engineering fields such as automobile and aerospace industries, electronics, and biomedical industries
The Artificial Neural Network and Taguchi Techniques are used to find a set of optimal process parameters that will result in a part with minimum possible short shot, shrinkage rate, and warpage
In experiment number 1, filling time, part cooling time, and melt temperature are at their minimum levels, which leads to a high level of short shot possibility
Summary
Plastics offer a wide range of advanced mechanical properties such as high strength-toweight ratio, flexibility, corrosion resistance, transparency, etc., which make them irreplaceable materials in various engineering fields such as automobile and aerospace industries, electronics, and biomedical industries. A short shot occurs when insufficient material is injected into the mold or flow freezes before the mold cavity is fully filled [10]. It is caused by different factors such as the wrong plastic material selection, incorrect processing parameters, incorrect mold design, and part design [11]. The influence of runner/gate design on the quality of an injected part was investigated by Tsai [13], who placed a rectangular flow restrictor within the tertiary runner of a precision optical lens mold to achieve uniform melt temperature distribution in the runner channel and reduce the thermal residual stress and warpage of injection-molded parts. Kim et al [15] used numerical analysis to investigate polymer flow patterns for different gate locations, and results showed that wrong positioning of the gate prevented flow to the other side of the part and resulted in short shots
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