• Journal of the Korean Society for Precision Engineering
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• v.22 no.1
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• pp.137-142
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• 2005

Gas-Assisted Injection Molding(GAIM) is an innovative technology for producing plastic parts and has been received extensive attention in the plastic manufacturing industries. But, due to gas-polymer interacting during the gas injection phase, the process has significantly different characteristics from conventional injection molding and, therefore, the control of the process requires much technical knowledge in processing and materials. The experiment was performed about variations of gas-penetration length that is affected by filling imbalance resulting from the structure of runner. The Taguchi method was used for the design of experiment. The most effective factors for the gas-penetration length were the shot size and mold temperature. The most effective factors for the difference of the gas-penetration length were the melt temperature and shot size. This study also discussed the filling imbalance phenomenon in a unary branch runner type mold that has geometrically balanced runner.

• Transactions of Materials Processing
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• v.17 no.5
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• pp.322-327
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• 2008

LGP is a key component of LCD back light unit because it determines brightness and sharpness of the display image. Usually, it has optical patterns fabricated on the bottom surface. These optical patterns convert point or line sources placed in the side of LGP to plane source at the top surface by changing the propagating direction of the incident light. In the present paper the LiGA-reflow method was applied to fabricate the LGP mold. Furthermore, the optical simulation considering the replication ratio of pattern height was applied to the pattern design. The optical simulation through systematic correction scheme was adopted to find the optimum distribution of pattern density. Finally, the stamper fabricated by this method was installed in the mold and LGP was produced by injection molding. As a result of luminance measurement for the final product, the average luminance and luminance uniformity was measured 3,180 nit and 84%, respectively. Consequently, the mold fabrication method using the LiGA-reflow and optical simulation(CAE) can save the expense and time compared with the existing fabrication methods(laser ablation and chemical etching).

• Design & Manufacturing
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• v.15 no.3
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• pp.7-12
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• 2021

Plastic injection molds used for rapid heating and cooling must minimize surface damage due to friction and maintain excellent thermal and low electrical conductivity. Accordingly, various surface treatments are being applied. The properties of Al₂O₃ coating and DLC coating were compared to find the optimal surface treatment method. Al₂O₃ coating was deposited by thermal spray method. DLC films were deposited by sputtering process in room temperature and high temperature PECVD (Plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition) process in 723 K temperature. For the evaluation of physical properties, the electrical and thermal conductivity including surface hardness, adhesion and wear resistance were analyzed. The electrical resistance of the all coated samples was showed insulation properties of 24 MΩ/sq or more. Especially, the friction coefficient of high temp. DLC coating was the lowest at 0.134.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers A
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• v.39 no.10
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• pp.1021-1028
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• 2015

Subminiature lenses are currently widely used in mobile phone cameras and are usually produced by injection molding. The lens molding process has the unique feature of a runner volume that is much larger than the part volume, and this feature should be considered when determining the mold design and molding conditions. In this study, a shell-type runner was proposed as an alternative to the conventional cylindrical runner used for lens molding. An injection molding simulation was performed by applying the proposed shell runner, and the simulation results were compared with those from the cylindrical runner case. It was found that the shell runner could considerably reduce the runner cooling time with only a slight increase in the injection pressure. The effect of the runner thickness was then investigated numerically in terms of the mold filling and cooling characteristics, from which an optimal runner thickness could be determined.

• Design & Manufacturing
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• v.11 no.2
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• pp.1-8
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• 2017

In this study, we applied microcellular foaming injection molding process to improve the performance of system air-conditioner drain fan which had been produced by injection molding process and studied the optimization of process conditions through 6-sigma process and response surface method (RSM) to reduce weight and deformation of products. Additive type, melt temperature, mold temperature, and injection screw shape were selected as the factor affecting the weight and deformation of the products by carrying out analysis of trivial many through ANOVA and design of experiment (DOE) method. Among the effect factor, we set the addictive type to Long G/F and screw shape to foaming screw which had the highest level of weight reduction and deformation reduction. The amount of foaming agent gas was set at 60 ml, which was the limit beyond which the weight of product did not decrease any more. For melt temperature and mold temperature, we studied the conditions where both weight and deformation were minimized using the RSM. As a result, we set the melt temperature to $250^{\circ}C$, fixed mold temperature to $20^{\circ}C$, and moving mold temperature to $40^{\circ}C$. The improvement effect was analyzed by appling the selected optimal conditions to the production process using the microcellular foaming injection molding. The results showed that the mean weight of product was measured to be 1,420g which was 19% lower than that measured in the current process. The standard deviations of the weights were found to be similar to those in the current process and it showed a low dispersion. The mean deformation was measured to be 0.9237mm, which represented a 57% reduction compared to the mean deformation in the current process, and the standard deviation decreased from 0.3298mm to 0.1398mm. Moreover, we analyzed the process capability for deformation, and the results showed that the short-term process capability increased from 2.73 to 6.60 which was even higher than targeted level of 6.0.

• Design & Manufacturing
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.1-7
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• 2021

A study on in-mold punching technology for hole piercing during molding of hollow plastic parts was conducted. Considering the non-linearity of the HDPE plastic material, mechanical properties were obtained according to the change in temperature and load speed. A standard specimen for the in-mold punching test was designed to implement the in-mold punching process, and the specimen was obtained through injection molding. In order to analyze the influence of process variables during in-mold punching, an in-mold punching mold capable of controlling variables such as temperature and support pressure of the specimen was designed and manufactured. Mold heating characteristics were confirmed through finite element analysis, and punching simulations for changes in process conditions were performed to analyze punching characteristics and reflected in the experiment. Through simulations and experiments, it was found that the heating temperature, punch shape, punching speed, and pressure of the back side of the specimen were very important during in-mold punching of HDPE materials, and optimal conditions were acquired within a given range.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.20 no.7
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• pp.607-612
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• 2019

The softness of the crashpad part is one of the important factors which affect the interior perceived quality of the vehicle interior. And while improving the softness of the crashpad part, every effort to lower the production cost has been going on. The PU foaming process for the crashpad part depends on the understanding of a lot of processes, tools and material properties. Therefore, to achieve the requirement of the customer for the interior part's visual quality, the integrated design techniques are investigated to correlate the processes, tool design, material design and the computer aided analysis. In this paper, IMG (In Mold Grain) designed concept is firstly developed to integrate the skin preforming, plastic injection molding of the substrate and the foaming process in a tool within reduced processes. Through the application of this technology, softness of crashpad is improved by 40% compared to the conventional vacuum molding method, and the existing process is reduced by 50% by integrating the injection process and the manufacturing process. And by integrating the injection mold and the skin mold and removing the foaming mold, the number of molds are reduced from 3 to 1, resulting in 20% reduction in the cost of applying a medium-sized passenger car.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Technology of Plasticity Conference
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• 2002.02a
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• pp.84-94
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• 2002

• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Technology of Plasticity Conference
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• 2006.05a
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• pp.95-98
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• 2006

LCD-BLU (Back Light Unit) is one of kernel parts of LCD unit. The fabrication method of a 3-D micro mold patterned with micro-lenses for the LGP (Light Guiding Plate), one of the most important parts of LCD-BLU, was presented. Instead of dot pattern made by etching, 3-D optical pattern design with $50{\mu}m$ micro-lens was applied in the present study. The micro-lens pattern fabricated by modified LiGA with thermal reflow process was applied to the optical design of LGP. The positive micro-lens patterned injection mold with different aspect ratios (i.e. 0.3 and 0.4) was fabricated with modified LiGA with thermal reflow process. The brightness of LCD-BLU increased as aspect ratio of micro-lens increased.

• 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.