Shape retention of injection molded stainless steel compacts

The effects of the binder composition, the powder loading, the thermal properties of feedstocks, and the injection molding parameters on the compact shape retention for metal injection molding 17-4PH stainless steel were investigated. The high-density polyethylene is more effective than ethylene vinyl acetate as a second component of the wax-based binder to retain compact shape due to its higher pyrolytic temperature and less heat of fusion. The compact distortion decreases with increasing the powder loading, molding pressure and molding temperature. There exists an optimal process combination including the powder loading of 68%, molding pressure of 120MPa and molding temperature of 150℃. Under this process condition, the percentage of distorted compacts is the lowest.

Numerical simulation method for weld line development in micro injection molding process

In order to reduce the "trial-mold" risk and cost,numerical simulation method was applied to micro injection molding weld line development investigation. The micro tensile specimen which has the size of 0.1 mm(depth) ×0.4 mm(width) ×12 mm(length) in test area was selected as the objective part,and polypropylene(PP) as the experimental material. Respectively with specific commercial software(Mold Flow) and general computational fluid dynamic(CFD) software(Comsol Multiphysics) ,the simulation experiments for development of weld line in micro injection molding process were executed and the real comparison experiments were also carried out. The results show that during micro injection molding process,the specific commercial software for normal injection molding process is not valid to describe the micro flow process,the shape of flow front in micro cavity flowing which is important in weld line developing study and the contact angle due to surface tension are not able to be simulated. In order to improve the simulation results for micro weld line development,the general CFD software,which is more flexible in user defining function,is applied. The results show better effects in describing micro fluid flow behavior. As a conclusion,as for weld line forming process,the numerical simulation method can give a characteristic analysis results for processing parameters optimizing in micro injection molding process;but for both kinds of softwares quantitative analysis cannot be obtained unless the boundary condition and micro fluid mathematic model are improved in the future.

Simulation of Non-isothermal Injection Molding for a Non-Newtonian Fluid by Level Set Method

A non-isothermal injection molding process for a non-Newtonian viscous pseudoplastic fluid is simulated.A conservative interface capturing technique and the flow field solving method are coupled to perform a dynamic simulation.The validity of the numerical method is verified by a benchmark problem.The melt interface evolution versus time is captured and the physical quantities such as temperature,velocity and pressure at each time step are obtained with corresponding analysis.A"frozen skin"layer with the thickness increasing versus time during the injection process is found.The fact that the"frozen skin"layer can be reduced by increasing the injection velocity is numerically verified.The fountain flow phenomenon near the melt interface is also captured.Moreover,comparisons with the non-isothermal Newtonian case show that the curvatures of the interface arcs and the pressure contours near the horizontal mid-line of the cavity for the non-Newtonian pseudoplastic case is larger than that for the Newtonian case.The velocity profiles are different at different positions for the non-Newtonian pseudoplastic case,while in the case of Newtonian flow the velocity profiles are parabolic and almost the same at different positions.