Abstract
In order to produce high-quality optical components, aspheric lenses have been widely applied in recent years. An aspheric lens consists of aspheric surfaces instead of spherical ones, which causes difficulty in the design process as well as the manufacturing procedure. Although injection molding is widely used to fabricate optical lenses owing to its high productivity, there remains lots of difficulty to determine appropriate mold design factors and injection molding parameters. In the injection molding fields, computer simulation has been effectively applied to analyze processes based on the shell analysis so far. Considering the geometry of optical lenses, however, numerical analysis based on solid elements has been reported as more reliable approach than shell -based one. The present work covers three-dimensional injection molding simulation using MP1/Flow3D and relevant deformation analysis of an injection molded plastic lens based on solid elements. Numerical analysis has been applied to the injection molding processes of an aspheric lens for a photo pick-up device. The reliability of the proposed approach has been verified in comparison with the experiments.
