Abstract
The new trend in the composites industry, as dictated by Industry 4.0, is the personalization of mass production to match every customer’s individual needs. Such synergy can be achieved when several traditional manufacturing techniques are combined within the production of a single part. One of the most promising combinations is additive manufacturing (AM) with injection molding. AM offers higher production freedom in comparison with traditional techniques. As a result, even very sophisticated geometries can be manufactured by AM at a reasonable price. The bottleneck of AM is the production rate, which is several orders of magnitude slower than that of traditional plastic mass production technologies. On the other hand, injection molding is a manufacturing technique for high-volume production with little possibility of customization. The customization of injection-molded parts is usually very expensive and time-consuming. In this research, we offered a solution for the individualization of mass production, which includes 3D printing a baseplate with the subsequent overmolding of a rib element on it. We examined the bonding between the additive-manufactured component and the injection-molded component. As bonding strength between the coupled elements is significantly lower than the strength of the material, we proposed five strategies to improve bonding strength. The strategies are optimizing the printing parameters to obtain high surface roughness, creating an infill density in fused filament fabrication (FFF) parts, creating local infill density, creating microstructures, and incorporating fibers into the bonding area. We observed that the two most effective methods to increase bonding strength are the creation of local infill density and the creation of a microstructure at the contact area of FFF-printed and injection-molded elements. This increase was attributed to the porous structures that both methods created. The melt during injection molding flowed into these pores and formed micro-mechanical interlocking.
Highlights
The modern plastic industry is currently undergoing significant changes, which is dictated by the requirements of Industry 4.0
At a layer height of 0.2 mm, it is evident that surface roughness is much higher than in the case of a layer height of 0.1 mm with both printing orientations
At lower speeds (20 and 40 mm/s), the layers are deposited and cooled very slowly, which leads to more definite patterns, which in turn leads to higher surface roughness
Summary
The modern plastic industry is currently undergoing significant changes, which is dictated by the requirements of Industry 4.0. The most effective and most established plastic mass production technique is injection molding, which is usually associated with the high equipment cost, mold development that takes a long time, and slow response to possible changes in product design and/or the process itself. Additive manufacturing (AM), a relatively new plastic processing technique, typically does not involve high costs and is considered a highly versatile process [2,3]. Howalso significantly simplify the transfer from the results gained in the lab to the industrial ever, AM’s bottleneck is the production rate in the long run, which is three to four orders product [5]. AM’s bottleneck is the production rate in the long run, which is three of magnitude slower than that of injection molding [6]. A combination of a production rate and customized production can be achieved with hybrid technologies, relatively high production rate and customized production can be achieved with hybrid where several plastic processing combined manufacture a single part technologies, where several plastic techniques processing are techniques are to combined to manufacture a [7,8,9,10]
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