Design and development of hand operated injection moulding machine for manufacturing recycled plastic articles

Abstract

A large quantity of plastics is wasted every day in the world and the waste accumulates polluting every place and environment. Recycling of wasted plastics would be a good alternate for fresh production of raw materials. Hence, design and development of hand operated injection molding machine for manufacturing recycled plastic articles for small scale industries and tertiary institutions were studied. In this work, recycled molten plastic materials are injected into a closed mold, where it solidifies and gives the desired shape as per the mold dimensions. The functional prototype machine was designed and developed for recycling waste plastic and to make useful products. Based on the phases of product design and development; customer need assessment, concept generation, concept selection, detail design, mold flow analyses and manufacturing were done. Design and manufacturing were done with the available materials and software. Manufacturing drawing and 3D model was prepared using Catia V5, machine fabrication and cost analysis was carried out. Finally, the performance of the injection molding machine mold flow was tested using virtual prototyping of selected plastic article with the help of solid works plastics 2014 software. Experimental procedure was done by preparing specimens of recycled Polypropylene plastic according to ISO 197-1 and ASTM D695-02a standard for impact and compression test respectively. The result of selected plastic article (plastic cap) obtained from simulation shows, pressure and flow front central temperature at the end fill was 0.8 MPa and 1820c respectively. The pack time required for the plastic component was 7.5 seconds. The result obtained from experiment shows that the recycled Polypropylene manufactured using the developed machine attains average impact and low compression strength compared to the fresh raw material. Thus, the recycled material is useful to manufacture plastic articles which can reduce wastes considerably.