A study on the development of engineering plastic piston used in the shock absorber

A piston is an important component of the shack absorber which determines comfortable riding and handling. Conventional piston is made of metal powder that is pressed in a mold, and then sintered at high temperatures below the melting point before machining processes such as drilling, sizing and teflon banding. This study aims at cutting down cost and weight, and improving the process by replacing the traditional sintering process used for manufacturing the shock absorber with the injection molding process adopting engineering plastics as raw material. To analyze the injection molding process, we used the commercial program, MOLDFLOW, and obtained an optimal combination of the process parameters. In addition, by comparing the engineering plastic piston with the metal powder piston through the formability and the performance experiments, we confirmed the availability of this alternative process suggested.