Saving Costs and Time by Means of Gas-assisted Powder Injection Molding

Abstract

This chapter provides an introduction to gas-assisted powder injection molding. The use of gas-assisted injection molding leads to inner hollow sections and the consumption of raw material can be cut while the stiffness of the part remains on a high level. It is possible to increase part's volume while keeping the consumption of material constant. For these reasons, gas-assisted injection molding results in a more cost-effective production of plastics. The transfer of gas-assisted injection molding to powder injection molding has several advantages. Because of the increased surface and the lower material consumption besides the saving of cycle time, a considerable saving for debinding and sintering can be expected and during injection molding of compact parts molecular orientations and internal stresses are induced by flow effects for the entire holding pressure phase to compensate volume shrinkage. The orientations caused by holding pressure phase are eliminated using gas-assisted injection molding because of the constant pressure level over flow length.