OPTIMIZATION OF INJECTION-MOLDING DESIGN .2. MOLDING CONDITIONS OPTIMIZATION

The quality of an injection molded part is affected by many factors. These include geometric parameters associated with the mold design and the cooling system design as well as process parameters such as the molding conditions during the filling phase. In the companion paper, the problem of automatic optimization of gate location was addressed. In this paper, a methodology for molding condition optimization is presented. The optimization problem can be broken into three parts. An approximate feasible molding space (AFMS) is first determined to constrain the search space for the optimization algorithm. Quality is quantified as a function of flow simulation outputs and constitutes the objective function that must be minimized. The resulting optimization is solved by iterative search in the constrained space based on numerical optimization algorithms. The proposed methodology is not dependent on any particular simulation package and may be applied for any thermoplastic material and any complex mold geometry. Copyright © 1990 Society of Plastics Engineers