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Plastic Injection molding is one of the most popular manufacturing processes for making thermoplastic products, and mold design is a key aspect of the process. Design of molds requires knowledge, expertise and most importantly experience in the field. When one of these is lacking, selection of an appropriate mold for manufacturing a plastic component is done on a trial-and-error basis. This increases the cost of production and introduces inconsistencies in the design.7390
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This paper describes the development of an intelligent mold design tool. The tool captures knowledge about the mold design process and represents the knowledge in logical fashion. The knowledge acquired will be deterministic and non-deterministic information about the mold design process. Once developed the mold design tool will guide the user in selecting an appropriate mold for his plastic part based on various client specifications.
Introduction
The plastic injection molding process demands knowledge, expertise and, most important, experience for its successful implementation. Often it is the molding parameters that control the efficiency of the process. Effectively controlling and optimizing these parameters during the manufacturing process can achieve consistency, which takes the form of part quality and part cost.
The level of experience of the manufacturer(s) determines how effectively the process parameters are controlled. This sometimes leads to inconsistency introduced by human error. There is also the case where there is inexperience, shortage of time, resources and little scope for innovation. Knowledge-based engineering provides a feasible solution to all these problems by creating what is called an “intelligent model” of the problem.
1 IKEM
Intelligent Knowledge based Engineering modules for the plastic injection molding process (IKEM) is a software technology that is a step ahead of the concurrent engineering and CAD/CAM systems. It integrates current knowledge about the design and manufacturing processes and helps to reduce several man-hours by reducing engineering changes in the design phase of product development by giving users instruction about various design aspects. The system will be used for injection molding design, design iterations, and process integration. The current process consists of many manual computations, CAD graphical constructions, and experience attained from previous projects. Once the engineer completes the design, it will be evaluated for performance. The IKEM project has been pided into three major modules.
1. The cost estimation module
2. The mold design module
3. The Manufacturing module
Input to the IKEM system is of two forms. Input in the form of a CAD model (Pro-E file) and input given at the User Interface form. Figure 1 illustrates the kind of input that goes into each module and the output given to the user. Figure 1. Organization of the IKEM Project
2 Intelligent Mold Design Tool
The mold design tool in its basic form is a Visual Basic application taking input from a text file that contains information about the part and a User Input form. The text file contains information about the part geometry parsed from a Pro/E information file. The input is used to estimate the dimensions of mold and various other features.
2.1 Literature Review
Design of molds is another stage of the injection molding process where the experience of an engineer largely helps automate the process and increase its efficiency. The issue that needs attention is the time that goes into designing the molds.Often, design engineers refer to tables and standard handbooks while designing a mold, which consumes lot of time. Also, a great deal of time goes into modeling components of the mold in standard CAD software. Different researchers have dealt with the issue of reducing the time it takes to design the mold in different ways. Koelsch and James have employed group technology techniques to reduce the mold design time. A unique coding system that groups a class of injection molded parts, and the tooling required in injection molding is developed which is general and can be applied to other product lines.