Uniform Design and Kriging Surrogate Modeling in Improvement of Warpage and Ejection Time of an Injection Molded Plastic Spur Gear

Abstract

This paper aims to present the application of uniform design of experiments, mold flow analysis, Kriging surrogate modeling, and optimization algorithms to the improvement of warpage and ejection time of an injection molded plastic spur gear. Firstly, uniform design method is applied to build a set of experiments. Secondly, for each experiment, simulation software Moldflow is employed to analyze the warpage distribution and ejection time of the plastic spur gear. Thirdly, Kriging surrogate modeling method is applied to construct the maximum warpage and ejection time surrogate models. Fourthly, a genetic algorithm and a sequential quadratic programming algorithm are used to solve the optimal solutions of parameters minimizing the maximum warpage surrogate model. Finally, a verification experiment is executed in Moldflow to ensure that the optimal solutions determined via surrogate model can act as near-optimal solutions to the real problem.