Critical factors to consider for designing ideal injection molding tool ...

Plastic injection molding is a highly preferred process for designing intricate shapes.

Today injection molding has become one of the most preferred methods for creating identical plastic products in bulk. But it is extremely important to recognize the importance of injection molding tool designs for getting high-quality and cost-effective parts.

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In fact, tool designs are the most significant parts of the injection molding process.

This content will help you to understand the process of injection molding. Moreover, what 4 factors are important to consider for designing high-quality tooling designs?

Let’s start!

What is injection molding?

Injection molding is a highly advantageous technique to produce plastic products. It needs an injection molding machine, plastic raw material, and a mold to create the products.

Hence, you can easily produce a huge variety of products using injection molding, which varies greatly in size, complexity, and application. You can have the benefit of selecting from a large selection of polymer resins to choose from.

As well as you can get thousands of parts before the tooling needs to be maintained. Further, for getting precision quality parts you need the perfect injection molding tool designs.

You need the perfect plastic parts so you must consider all essential factors for creating high-quality tooling designs. We will discuss them in the next portion of this content.

What are the types of injection Molding?

We are describing here the 6 highly beneficial technologies that are increasingly helping modern injection molding companies. Moreover, they are ideal to produce parts more rapidly and with higher quality.

These top 6 latest types of injection molding are:

1. Thin wall molding
2. Metal injection molding
3. Gas-assisted injection molding
4. Liquid silicone injection molding
5. 3D printing
6. Unique material formulation.

What is injection molding tool design?

As we have already described to you that for high-end plastic parts, you need injection molding tool designs with perfect ideology. Hence, for this purpose, you should prefer to work with the perfect custom plastic injection mold tooling company for your unique project.

Furthermore, the first tool in tool designs for plastic injection molding is a mold.

Importance of mold in injection molding:

Basically, a mold is a hollow shell that is helpful to set the shape of the product that you want to create. Just like a Jell is poured into a Jell-O mold to create shapes. It helps to get the perfect products with great design feasibility.

Actually, it will be impossible in several other conditions to achieve identical parts. But in injection molding liquefied plastic is injected into a plastic injection mold to obtain similar shapes of intricate parts.

Other essential mold components in injection molding tool designs

In fact, the other most important mold components in injection molding tool designs are:

• Jigs;
• fixtures;
• gauges;

and many other pieces of equipment that are also necessary to use in the injection molding process.

All the above-mentioned instruments are extremely critical for the perfection of your injection molding project. However, in injection molding, all these essential tooling components are also known as secondary instruments.

Hence, with the help of these tools, you can improve the efficiency and effectiveness of a mold as well as can boost the overall quality of other secondary tools.

The 4 factors for designing high-quality injection molding tool designs are:

These four factors are really important to consider when you need to design high-quality tooling designs. These are:

Injection Mold Design:

Actually, a huge range of factors affects mold design such as the quantity of the product that you want to produce and the kinds of materials being molded, along with the type of mold itself. A mold that can create single or multiple molded parts during one cycle.

Rapid prototyping:

Basically, rapid prototyping is a unique combination of several techniques that a molder uses to rapidly-produce a model of a part with the help of CAD data.

Moreover, you can also develop this model using CNC milling technology with 3D printing.

Machining:

Machining of the injection molding tool designs is actually the technique of shaping metals with the help of

• cutting
• grinding
• shearing
• boring as well as other forms of material removal or deformation.

You can also use several other rigid materials instead of metals according to your project needs.

Injection Mold Manufacturing:

In fact, you can manufacture injection mold dies using a wide variety of materials. In addition, this variety includes a big range of aluminum to hardened steel.

You should select the best material according to your production’s need. As all related expenses and durability of your mold directly relate to the production quantity of the components.

What is the process of injection molding?

It is very simple. First of all, a molder fed the raw material that is in the form of pellets into the molding machine. Further, this raw material is advanced towards the mold by using the injection unit.

During this whole process, the material is melted using pressure and heat. The amount that a molder injects into the molding machine is called the shot.

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Further, this liquid material is injected into a closed metal mold tool. Now, this molten material gets cool and achieves the final shape of the mold. in the next step, it opens to eject the moldings. After this delivery, a molder performs all necessary inspections or secondary operations.

How many types of injection molding machines are there?

There are several kinds of molding machines. It totally depends on what you want to create and how does the machine affects the products.

Basically, manufacturers classify the molding machines according to their systems and portions.

1. Hydraulic Injection Molding Machine
2. Electric Injection Molding Machines
3. Hybrid Injection Molding Machines.

Which is the best injection molding machine?

In fact, there are lots of molding machine manufacturers. But you can check out this list of top 5 injection molding machine manufacturers, it will really help you to purchase a perfect molding machine.

• ARBURG
• ENGEL
• Sumitomo Demag
• Haitian International
• Husky Injection Molding Systems

How do I choose an injection molding machine?

Actually, selecting the perfect plastic injection molding machine is an extremely important criterion. Since the quality of your products depends on a molding machine so you should select it with great care.

The best selection process is:

• You should deeply know the plastic parts you want to mold
• Attentively select the type of machine (electro, hybrid, hydraulic)
• Carefully calculate all the clamp tonnage requirements
• As well as correctly calculate the injection unit size.

What are the disadvantages of injection molding?

Although injection molding has several benefits for producing ideal plastic products it also has some drawbacks such as:

• Its tooling cost is high.
• Product designs have some restrictions.
• The injection molding is a costly process even for small runs.

Conclusion:

All in all, injection molding is an ideal process with perfect injection molding tool designs. Moreover, it has a wide range of colors and materials selections. All the mold products are repeatable and have tight tolerance.

Its tooling cost is rather high but it can be covered using some suitable requirements.

When looking at injection moulding cavity pressure sensors, the sheer number of products to choose from can be a bit overwhelming. In order to choose the proper sensor for your application, it’s vital to fully understand all of the options and what will work for your specific project.

Some sensor selection considerations include:

• How will the sensor be installed
• Where will it be installed
• How much space it needs
• The temperature needs to endure
• How many will there be in the mould
• What type of sensor technology

We’re going to focus on the type of sensor technology.

What Types of Cavity Pressure Sensors Are Used in Injection Molding?

There are two main types of sensors: strain gauge and piezoelectric (piezo).

Strain gauge sensors have a full or partial Wheatstone bridge strain gauge sensing element (fun fact: it inspired our logo). When force is applied, the gage is deformed, causing its electrical resistance to change. The resulting changes in current are interpreted by a process control system (such as CoPilot) which can be displayed in graphical format.

Piezoelectric sensors have a quartz crystal in the sensor that, when force is applied, emits an electrical charge. This electrical charge is amplified to a signal that can then be sent to a process control system (such as CoPilot), where it can be displayed in graphical format.

Both technologies are reliable, and we recognize the benefits each may have over the other depending on the application; however, we have identified strain gauge sensors as our preferred technology for several reasons. Let’s review the benefits of strain gauge sensors and why they are preferred in most scenarios.

What Are the Benefits of Strain Gage Sensors?

Let’s review the benefits of strain gauge sensors specifically and why they might be a good option for your application.

1. Less Risk of Contamination

Contamination is any outside substance that causes inaccurate data readings. It happens when debris, water, or moisture sneaks into the electrical sections of a sensor system, greatly skewing the data.

Piezo sensor systems as a whole have many locations that can be exposed to contamination, causing drift in data and potential failure of the sensor itself. An example of this is any connection point, either at the sensor or on the side of the mould.

Strain gauge sensors are highly robust and are inherently immune to all but the most severe forms of contamination. This means you can rest assured that your hardware is collecting accurate data.

2. Higher Temperature Tolerances

It’s important to take into consideration how hot you will be running your mould. Each sensor head has a maximum temperature that it can withstand—going above that will cause damage to your sensor and inaccurate data. Piezo sensors can withstand up to 392°F (200°C), whereas some strain gauge sensors can withstand up to 425°F. That means they can be used in a wider array of machines and applications without risk of damage to the sensor head.

3. Better Shielding from Signal Noise

Strain gauge cables are permanently mated to the sensor head, providing more shielding against ambient electrical currents or build-up through the tool. Each connection point for the Piezoelectric sensors is a break in the shielding, which may allow stray electricity to interfere with the picocoulombs of the signal generated by the piezoelectric crystals under load. This signal interference is then magnified by the signal amplifiers necessary to boost the crystals’ generated current to a level detectable by modern computers (such as process control systems).

4. In-Mold Sensor Diagnostics

A frequently overlooked benefit of strain gauge sensors is the ability to diagnose the health of the sensor while it is installed in the mould. The readings from a strain gauge sensor at rest can determine whether a cable has been crushed during installation, the sensor is improperly installed, or the sensor has been overloaded or damaged. On the other hand, piezo sensors only provide very limited data for diagnosing sensor problems. This can be helpful in detecting problems in the tool room before the mould is installed in the press, saving significant downtime if a problem occurs.

5. Lower Cost Solution

One of the biggest things that sets strain gauge sensors apart from piezo is that they are a lower-cost option with the same data quality as a piezo sensor. When looking at equipping all of your moulds with multiple sensors per mould, the savings add up fast. Though this is important, we want to make sure that you’re receiving the proper equipment for your application based on all factors, not just cost. But if those align, this is a huge benefit and win for your budget.

Conclusion

Overall, strain gauge and piezo sensors are very comparable in performance and final data displayed on a process control system. Their resolution and accuracy are in line with one another, and they both offer a large array of sensor head sizes. Strain gauge sensors offer a more robust design that is more likely to provide accurate data, ease of debugging, higher temperature threshold options, and a lower cost solution with comparable results.

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