Dimensional accuracy optimization of the micro-plastic injection molding process using the Taguchi design method

Abstract

Plastic injection molding is an important field in manufacturing industry because there are many plastic products that are produced by injection molding. However, the time and cost required for producing a precision mold are the most troublesome problems that limit the application at the development stage of a new product in precision machinery industry. This study presents an approach of manufacturing a hard mold with microfeatures for micro-plastic injection molding. This study also focuses on Taguchi design method for investigating the effect of injection parameters on the dimensional accuracy of Fresnel lens during plastic injection molding. It was found that the dominant factor affecting the microgroove depth of Fresnel lens is packing pressure. The optimum processing parameters are packing pressure of 80 MPa, melt temperature of 240 °C, mold temperature of 90 °C and injection speed of 50 m/s. The dimensional accuracy of Fresnel lens can be controlled within ±3 µm using the optimum level of process parameters through the confirmation test. The research results of this study have industrial application values because electro-optical industries are able to significantly reduce a new optical element development cycle time.

Intelligent Injection Molding on Sensing, Optimization, and Control

“…Noniterative optimization methods are easy to implement and require less computation. ey have been widely used in research, including the following methods: case-based reasoning (CBR) [3], expert system, fuzzy system [99], and the Taguchi method [100][101][102][103][104][105][106][107][108][109][110][111][112][113][114][115][116].…”

“…Applying the Taguchi method, Kuo and Liao [100] and Lin and Hsieh [101] investigated the influence of parameters on the accuracy of lens geometry. Many other researchers have also applied the Taguchi method to optimize residual stress, volume shrinkage, and warpage properties [102][103][104].…”

“…It has a computational structure that consists of a number of highly interconnected processing units called neurons. e neurons sum up weighted inputs and then apply a linear or nonlinear [103,104,109,115,116,123] Shrinkage [103,109,111] Mechanical properties [105,106,108] Multiple properties [102,107] Dimensional accuracy [100] Residual stress [101,103] Central composite design (CCD)…”

Optimization of gating system for the inverter shell injection mold based on Moldflow

“…The simulation analysis results of the initial design show that the imbalance rate of filling time between cavity reached 2.1%, the maximum pressure difference at the filling end between two cavity was close to 47MPa when the volume/pressure was switched, and the pressure figure at the injection position was abrupt at 1.131s due to the flow imbalance, so the gating system should be optimized. In order to reduce the time imbalance rate, reduce the pressure difference, and make the pressure chart change at the injection position stable [11][12].…”

Multi-objective Optimization of Friction Welding Process Parameters using Grey Relational Analysis for Joining Aluminium Metal Matrix Composite

“…The Ultimate Tensile Strength (UTS) and the Hardness (HD) of the welded joint plays a predominant role in deciding the weld quality. The Taguchi's DOE is an influential tool in quality optimization [6]. Taguchi's technique makes use of a special design of orthogonal array (OA) to study the required characteristics through a minimum number of experiments.…”