Effect of injection moulding parameters in reducing the shrinkage of polypropylene product using Taguchi analysis

Abstract

Nowadays, manufacturing industry is growing rapidly in any country over the world. Plastic industry is the one of the manufacturing industry that has high demand among consumers. Polypropylene is popular due to its characteristics such as recycle, low cost, chemical resistance, excellent impact strength, food grade availability and so on. The plastic product is normally produced by using an injection molding machine. The quality of the product depends on the injection molding parameters during the processing. Thus, the optimization of the injection molding parameters on processing polypropylene by using design of experiment is the main objective of the study. The best value of injection molding parameters such as melting temperature, injection pressure, injection speed, cooling time, holding time and holding pressure have been obtained and optimized using Taguchi method. From the results obtained, the most significant injection molding parameter on the shrinkage of polypropylene is holding time. The result has been supported by analysis of variance (ANOVA). The optimization of injection molding parameters contributes to the plastic processing such as increasing productivity as well as maintaining the dimension and quality performance of the product.