Optimization of an Injection Molding Process for Polycarbonate Car Switch Buttons Using the Taguchi Method

Abstract

The quality of polymeric automotive parts depends highly on an injection molding process, which causes various defects, such as warpage, sink marks, weld lines, shrinkage, residual stress, etc. This study is to determine the optimum processing parameters, such as packing pressure, mold temperature, melting temperature, and packing time for the manufacture of polycarbonate buttons in cars on the basis of FEM, the Taguchi method, and analysis of variance (ANOVA). As a result, the optimum processing parameters of buttons made of polycarbonate material were obtained as follows: 140 MPa of packing pressure, 105°C of mold temperature, 292.5°C of melting temperature and 1 second of packing time. A gain of S/N (signal to noise) ratio, 10.2, was obtained with the optimum values. Moreover, the melting temperature was found to be the most significant factor followed by the mold temperature.

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]. Xie et al [106] took four parameters into account and investigated the effect of key injection molding process parameters on the density and strength of a specimen.…”

“…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 for the prepreg compression molding of notebook computer cover using design of experiment and finite element method

“…To this end, studies on the effects of flow modeling and related factors to describe the compression process using composite materials have been carried out by several researchers [5][6][7]. Also, many studies have been conducted to analyze the effects of several process factors [8][9][10][11]. The effects of the several process factors including filling time, mold temperature, gate dimensions, etc.…”

“…The effects of the several process factors including filling time, mold temperature, gate dimensions, etc. in the plastic injection molding process were analyzed in the case of thin plate [8] and car switch button [9]. Also, the studies have been conducted to analyze the effects of the process conditions on the shrinkage of injection molded polypropylene [10] and the hyper-elastic materials characterization [11].…”