Effects of process parameters on the micro molding process

The trend towards miniaturization has brought about strong demand for increasingly smaller precision-molded plastic components. In order to control metering accuracy and homogeneity of the very small quantities of melt in the micro molding process, new micro molding machines that use an injection system comprising a screw extruder and a plunger injection unit have been developed. By use of such injection systems, standard plastic granules can be handled by the screw extruder and melt accuracy can be achieved by the electrically driven injection plunger. The objective of this work is to investigate the effects of the process parameters on the micro molding process and part quality. A series of micro gears were molded using a polyoxymethylene resin in a set of statistically designed experiments. Micro component inspection, characterization, and data analysis work was carried out to study the molded gears. It was found that metering size and holding pressure time are the process parameters that have the most significant effects on part quality, and that the process is also significantly affected by the interaction of these two parameters. There is an optimum metering size range in which the hold pressure can act together with the metering size to properly fill micro mold cavities.