Simulation of injection molding into rapid‐prototyped molds Available to Purchase

Injection molding is a very mature technology, but the growth of layer‐build, additive, manufacturing technologies (rapid prototypying) has the potential of expanding injection molding into areas not commercially feasible with traditional molds and molding techniques. This integration of injection molding with rapid prototyping has undergone many demonstrations of potential. What is missing is the fundamental understanding of how the modifications to the mold material and mold manufacturing process impact both the mold design and the injection molding process. This work expanded on an approach to utilize current numerical simulation programs and created a tool for optimizing the creation and use of non‐metal molds for injection molding. Verification and validation work is presented. The model was exercised by studying the effect of varying the thermal conductivity on final‐part distortions. This work clearly showed that one could not obtain reasonable results by simply changing a few input parameters in the current simulations. Although the approach did produce more realistic results, more work will be required for a tool capable of accurate, quantitative predictions.