Effect of packing pressure on stagnation weld-line strength for thermoplastic semicrystalline glass fiber reinforced material

Weld-Line in an injection molded part develops when two or more melt fronts are converged together. The weld-line is unavoidable when the design is complex where two melt flow fronts are mating each other head-to-head, this mating area is mechanically weak compared to other portions of the modeled part. The decrease in strength in the weld-line area can be attributed to several factors like molecular diffusion, fiber orientation effect, unoptimized process conditions, surface tension effect, internal residual stresses, etc. The strength of the weld-line area can be increased by optimizing injection molding process parameters like melt temperature, injection speed, packing pressure, changing gate type and location, etc. The present work focuses on studying the effect of packing pressure on strength of stagnation weld-line. This has been examined with experimental testing and scanning electron micrographs of the fractured surface on the weld-line and without weld-line specimens. The special injection mold is designed and fabricated to produce plaques having stagnation weld-line. The plaques are prepared out of 30% glass-filled Polyamide 6 material. The four sets of plaques are produced by changing the magnitude of packing pressure equal to 60% of filling pressure, with increment of 20% up to 120% of filling pressure. The tensile test specimens are machined on these plaques for two different angular orientations and testing is conducted as per ISO 527-2. The results demonstrated that, without weld-line specimens, the tensile modulus, stress at break marginally increases with an increase in packing pressure, and strain at break decreases with an increase in packing pressure. However, for specimens with stagnation weld-lines, both the tensile modulus and stress at break are observed to be 42% of without weld-lines samples for minimum packing pressure. The results obtained are evident from stress-strain graphs and scanning electron micrographs.