Ultrasonic micromoulding: Process characterisation using extensive in-line monitoring for micro-scaled products

Abstract

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A study of micromanufacturing process fingerprints in micro-injection moulding for machine learning and Industry 4.0 applications

“…Another force sensor (Kistler 9210AA) is attached to the mould tool for recording cavity pressure (P c ) for each moulded part. The details of this sensor attachment is similar to our previous work in which the sensor was located at the back of an ejector pin towards the end of the moulding cavity [2]. P c has been proved to be a very valuable data channel which can directly represent the quality of the micromoulded products as reported by several authors [8,21].…”

“…The product used in the present study is based on a 0.5-mmthick circular disc shape with 17 mm diameter which accommodates an array of microneedle cavities in 6×6 configuration in a μIM tool as discussed in our previous study [2,22]. The quality proxy of the moulded products in this work has been defined as the microreplication efficiency of the microneedle features (M μ ) obtained from each part or manufacturing cycle.…”

“…Data-rich manufacturing, Internet of Things (IoT), and cloud manufacturing are becoming more and more prominent every day and are addressing challenges such as product quality improvement, cost-effectiveness, and sustainability for many different sectors in industry and research. One big area of interest is the smart manufacturing of high added value micro and nano featured products where different physical phenomena are exploited for various technological applications [1][2][3][4]. Manufacture of such products can be costly and demands challenging process environments.…”

“…Micro-and nano-scale product manufacture brings in extreme conditions specific to the processes. This makes the implementation of machine learning concepts such as data-rich manufacturing even more difficult [2,[8][9][10]. Such challenging environments and manufacturing methods require very capable data capturing devices and sensors that can record the highly dynamic physical phenomena which results in multiple channels of complex information.…”

“…In-line process monitoring has been used rigorously for product development, quality assessment, and fault detection in a variety of micromanufacturing processes [13]. Our group has been a pioneer in implementing real-time monitoring solutions for μIM processes in the last 2 decades by attaching extensive sensor technologies on the machinery [2,[14][15][16]. μIM associated data is highly dynamical and are obtained from state-of-the-art measurement devices.…”