Abstract
Injection molded thermoplastic parts may need to be coated to facilitate paint adhesion, or to satisfy other surface property requirements, such as appearance, durability, and weather resistance. In this paper, a two-component polyurethane metering system was developed for the simultaneous injection and surface coating of a plastic substrate. The system was composed of storage tanks, feed pumps, axial piston pumps, mixing head. The tank was designed to be double-jacket structured and fabricated for polyol and isocyanate, respectively. A temperature chamber was used to maintain the material temperature to be $80^{\circ}C$ during flowing from storage tank to mixing head. Inside the chamber, feed pump, low pressure filter, high pressure pump, high pressure filter, pressure sensor, flow meter were installed. A mixing head of L-type was used for homogeneous mixing of polyol and isocyanate. Inside the mixing head, a cartridge heater and a temperature sensor were installed to control the temperature of the materials. The flow rate of axial-piston pump was controlled by using closed-loop feedback control algorithm. The input flow-rates were compared with the measured values. The output error was 6.7% for open-loop control, whereas the error was below 2.2% for closed-loop control. In addition, the pressure generated through mixing-head nozzle increased with increasing flow rate. It was found that the pressure drop between metering pump and mixing-head nozzle was almost 10 bar.
