An effective approach to measuring real-time mold deflection during injection molding

This study develops an effective approach to measure real-time mold plate flexion, namely a displacement of a cavity plate. A mold-filling program was used to simulate the injection molding process. The predicted cavity pressure was then applied as an input for the subsequent mold deflection analysis. In this work, an amorphous polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA) was injection-molded into a 6-inch light guide plate (LGP) cavity, with cavity plate thicknesses of 35 mm, 55 mm, and 100 mm. To validate the predicted mold deflection, an inductive displacement sensor was placed underneath the cavity plate, and experiments were conducted using process variables identical to those of the simulation. Comparison between the simulated results and the experimental data shows that when the cavity plate thickness is reduced, the mold deformation increases significantly, and results in an increase in part thickness. In addition, an increase in packing pressure caused a rise in mold deformation. This study demonstrates that the proposed approach is able to measure the mold deflection.