Plastic injection mold design and simulation with computer aided design

ABSTRACTIn recent days advances in manufacturing and software technology enable to make fast,accurate and high quality production. It is the same for plastic injection which is the oneof the most common and well known manufacturing process. For getting high qualityand fast manufacturing rates it is important to use computer in all phase of productionsuch as design, quality, manufacture and analysis. Moreover production time and costcan be reduced with the usage of computer.In this study, plastic materials are summarized briefly and some informations are givenabout plastic injection machine and process. Apart from these types of plastic injectionmoulds, runner systems, cooling, ejection and slider systems are explained and sometheoretical informations are given. After that the mould is designed for a commercialproduct with CAD program and flow analysis is made with a simulation program torealize the possible manufacturing problems. Some solutions are proposed aftersimulation and mould is re-designed according the simulation results. Moreoverstructural analysis is made to find how safety is the mould under process loads. At theend simulation results and the real manufactured samples are compared and usage ofsimulation programs is emphasized.Keywords: Plastic injection, plastic injection molds, mold design, computer aidedanalysis, computer aided design