• Korea-Australia Rheology Journal
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• v.20 no.2
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• pp.59-63
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• 2008

A theoretical model was developed to describe the flow behavior of a filled polymer in the packing stage of reaction injection molding and predict the residual stress distribution of thin injection-molded parts. The model predictions were compared with experiments performed for phenol-formaldehyde resin filled with wood dust and cured by urotropine. The packing stage of reaction injection molding process presents a typical example of complex non-isothermal flow combined with chemical reaction. It is shown that the time evolution of pressure distribution along the mold cavity that determines the residual stress in the final product can be described by a single 1D partial differential equation (PDE) if the rheological behavior of reacting liquid is simplistically described by the power-law approach with some approximations made for describing cure reaction and non-isothermality. In the formulation, the dimensionless time variable is defined in such a way that it includes all necessary information on the cure reaction history. Employing the routine separation of variables made possible to obtain the analytical solution for the nonlinear PDE under specific initial condition. It is shown that direct numerical solution of the PDE exactly coincides with the analytical solution. With the use of the power-law approximation that describes highly shear thinning behavior, the theoretical calculations significantly deviate from the experimental data. Bearing in mind that in the packing stage the flow is extremely slow, we employed in our theory the Newtonian law for flow of reacting liquid and described well enough the experimental data on evolution of pressure.

• Design & Manufacturing
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• v.16 no.4
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• pp.67-74
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• 2022

Injection molding is a cyclic process comprising of cooling phase as the largest part of this cycle. Providing efficient cooling in lesser cycle times is of significant importance in the molding industry. Recently, lots of researches have been done for rapid cooling of a hot-spot area using CO2 in injection molding. The CO2 flows under high pressure through small, flexible capillary tubes to the point of use, where it expands to create a snow and gas mixture at a temperature of -79℃. The gaseous CO2 removes heat from the mold and releases it into the atmosphere. In this paper, a CO2 cooling module was applied to an injection mold in order to cool a large area cavity uniformly and quickly, and the cooling performance of the injection mold was investigated. The product was a high-curvature molded part with a molding area of 300x100mm. Heat cartridges were installed in a stationary mold, and CO2 cooling module was inserted inside a movable mold. Through structural analysis, it was confirmed that the maximum deformation of mold with CO2 cooling module was 0.09mm. A CO2 feed system with a heat exchanger was used for cooling experiments. The CO2 was injected into the holes on both sides of the supply pipe of the cooling module and discharged through hexagon blocks to cool the mold. It took 5.8 seconds to cool the mold from an average temperature of 140℃ to 70℃. Through the experiment using CO2 cooling module, it was found that a cooling rate of up to 12.98℃/s and an average of 10.18℃/s could be achieved.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers A
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• v.27 no.1
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• pp.77-87
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• 2003

The residual stress and birefringence in injection-molded plastic parts can be divided into the flow-induced residual stress and birefringence produced in flowing stage, the thermally-induced residual stress and birefringence produced in cooling stage. However, the physics involved in the generation of the thermally-induced residual stress and birefringence still remains to be understood. Because polymer experiences viscoelastic history near the glass-transition temperature it is hard to model the entire process. Volume relaxation phenomenon was included to predict the final thermally-induced residual stress and birefringence in quenched plastic parts more accurately. The present study focused on comparing the predicted values far thermally-induced residual stress and birefringence with and without volume relaxation behavior (or free volume theory) under free and constrained quenching conditions. As a result, tile residual stress remained as a tensile stress at the center and as a compressible stress near the surface for the free quenching cases. In contract the residual stress remained as a compressible stress at the center and as a tensile stress near the surface fur the constrained quenching cases. The residual birefringence remained as minus values at the center and as plus values near the surface for the free quenching cases. Interestingly the residual birefringence showed minus values in entire zone for the constrained quenching cases. In the prediction of birefringence only the case including free volume theory showed the correct result for the distribution of birefringence in thickness direction.

• Composites Research
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• v.25 no.4
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• pp.117-125
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• 2012

Warpage of the film insert molded (FIM) part is caused by an asymmetric residual stress distribution. Asymmetric residual stress and temperature distribution is generated by the retarded heat transfer in the perpendicular direction to the attached film surface. Since warpage was not prevented by controlling injection molding conditions, glass fiber (GF) filled composites were employed as substrates for film insert molding to minimize the warpage. Distribution of short GFs was evaluated by using micro-CT equipment. Proper models for micro mechanics, anisotropic thermal expansion coefficients, and closure approximation should be selected in order to calculate fiber orientation tensor and warpage of the FIM part with the composite substrate. After six kinds of micro mechanics models, three models of the thermal expansion coefficient and five models of the closure approximation had been considered, the Mori-Tanaka model, the Rosen and Hashin model, and the third orthotropic closure approximation were selected in this study. The numerically predicted results on fiber orientation tensor and warpage were in good agreement with experimental results and effects of GF reinforcement on warpage of the FIM composite specimen were identified by the numerical results.

• Design & Manufacturing
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.18-23
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• 2016

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.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.9 no.6
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• pp.1726-1732
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• 2008

Injection molding is one of plastic forming technology which can easily mass-produce plastic parts with various and even complex shape. The technology has lots of difficulties in making a good part due to phase change of material, high applied pressure, and fast melt flow speed in the cavity. To overcome the problems, they had to make trial and error method until the CAE(Computer Aided Engineering) could be a tool for concurrent engineering. In this paper, we investigate the optimal design for a plastic DVD tray part by systematic approach of the commercial CAE program. In design, we should consider two objectives which are both dimensional stability and cost-down. The dimension of the part is crucial because the tray should carry a DVD correctly, but the part is too thin to injection-mold easily. In order to improve the moldability, the mold is designed in the form of stack mold which is a kind of 4 hot runner system. In first, we changed the stack-mold system with one hot-runner to cost down, and decided the optimal position of the gate. After that, we investigate the effect of both the layout of cooling channels and the cooling temperature on the shrinkage of the DVD tray. A optimal simulation approach, the gate design is 2Gate#3 and the layout is Case2 cooling line as the optimal temperature of $70^{\circ}C$. The Moldflow and PC+ABS are used for the CAE program and material respectively.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.9 no.6
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• pp.1754-1759
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• 2008

To produce plastic parts that have fine pattern through conventional injection molding, a lot of difficulties follow. Therefore, rapid heating and cooling methods are good candidates for manufacturing injection-molded parts with micro/nano patterns. In this study, we adopted the E-Mold patent technology. The mold for E-Mold technology has a separate heated core with micro heaters. It is very important to optimize the lay-out of the heaters in heated core because it influences both control and distribution of mold temperature. We developed a optimization method of heating line lay-out by using commercial softwares and compared the output with the experimental results. We used Pro-Engineer Wildfire 2.0 for the mold design, ICEMCFD for mesh generation, and FLUENT for heat transfer simulation. The simulation results showed the temperature profile from $60^{\circ}C$ to $120^{\circ}C$ or $180^{\circ}C$ during heating and cooling process which were compared with the injection molding experiments. We concluded that the simulation could well explain the experimental results. It was shown that the E-Mold optimization design for heater lay-out could be available through the simulation.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Information and Commucation Sciences Conference
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• 2021.05a
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• pp.623-625
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• 2021

Rubber o-rings are produced by conventional injection molding methods. In this case, products that are not normally molded are determined to be defective. However, if images acquired during image-based reading are read as original, there is a problem of poor accuracy. We have thus learned from convolutional neural networks using adaptive binarization and Convex Hull algorithms by extracting only rubber oring parts from the original images through pre-processing. During the test process, it was confirmed that the defect detection performance of the learning method applied pre-processing was better than the standard suggested.

• Polymer(Korea)
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• v.36 no.5
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• pp.555-563
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• 2012

Warpage of injection molded product is caused by non-uniform shrinkage during shaping operation and relaxation of residual stress. Robust part design and glass fiber reinforced reins have been adopted to prevent warpage of part. Warpages for part designs have been investigated in this study according to the injection molding conditions. Part design contains flat specimen and two different rib designs in the flat part. Resins used in this study were glass fiber reinforced amorphous plastics, PC and ABS. Different rib designs showed significant differences of warpages in the parts. Various warpages have been observed in the three regions of the part, near gate region, opposite region to the gate, and flow direction region. Results of computer simulation revealed that the warpages were strongly related to glass fiber orientation. Flat specimen showed the smallest warpage and the specimen with ribs to the flow direction showed a high resistance to warpage. Warpage highly depended upon part design rather than molding condition. It was concluded that the rib design and selection of gate location in injection molding would be the most important factors for the control of warpage since those are directly related to the fiber orientation during molding.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.15 no.3
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• pp.1241-1246
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• 2014

Take-out robots used for handling of the plastic parts manufactured with the injection mold are usually the gantry type that consists of long and thin links. In this study, we want to evaluate the safety of the take-out Robot structure through finite element analysis. The take-out Robot is automated robot to transport from one location to another in the molded article. The take-out Robot structure has a 380 kilogram weight, a 1300mm width, a 670.5mm depth and a 670mm height. It confirms the equivalent stress and the deformation of the load and its own weight through weight analysis. It looks for the natural frequency of the take-out robot through modal analysis. It confirms the acceleration, the normal stress and the deformation about the natural frequency of the take-out robot through response analysis. Also It repeats the analysis by changing the structure of the take-out robot, to confirm the results and it is determined whether the safety of the structure. These analysis results are effectively used to reduce the vibration of the take-out robot.