Development of a material for manufacturing a mold for plastic injection

Abstract

Injection molding is a process used to manufacture high volumes of plastic containers of complex geometric shapes. Although CuBe has always been used, there are currently some alternative alloys such as the CuNiSiCr alloy that has lower manufacturing cost and similar properties. The objective of this paper is to characterize, by techniques of microscopy, the process of fusion and thermo-mechanical treatments of the CuNiSiCr alloy. These results indicate that the forging process manages to break the grain boundary segregation without cracking the material. The hardness achieved after heat treatments is greater than 32HRc and conductivity reaches 27% IACS. These characteristics are similar to those of CuBe alloys.