Gate location optimization scheme for plastic injection molding

Abstract

Gate location of injection molding is vital to achieve high quality plastic part. The determination of gate location is an important issue in mold design. A computationally efficient scheme based on flow path is proposed to locate the optimum gate for achieving balanced flow. The range of filling time is employed as objective function. Comparisons were made between the flow path search scheme and the existing adjacent node evaluation scheme, and between the objective function of the range of filling time and the existing standard deviation of filling time. The two examples investigated indicated that the search routine based on the concept of flow path is more efficient computationally and the range of filling time is a better objective function to reflect the uniformity of fill.