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Product quality prognosis in plastic injection moulding

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Abstract

Plastic injection moulding is a typical complex manufacturing process. Its product quality is difficult to assure because of the nonuniform material shrinkage. This research introduces a prognostic concept for predicting the product quality (four edge shrinkages). The prognostic model is developed by path analysis through LISREL which can define the model’s reliability when only few sensory data are retrieved from the smoothly running system. The prognostic model is validated by 25 test runs. In each run, each of the nine manufacturing conditions is randomly set at the extreme limit, i.e., either the lower limit or the upper limit. By comparing the actual edge shrinkages defined by the finite element software Moldflow with the results predicted by the prognostic model, this research concludes the prognostic model can successfully predict the quality of products and prevent the production of defective products.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Moldflow Corporation in Taiwan for the permission to use the plastic part been analyzed in this research. Special thanks to the financial support from the research projects 96-2221-E-029-024 and 98-2221-E-029-019, National Science Council of Taiwan. The authors are grateful to the expert anonymous reviewers whose comments and suggestions considerably improved this article.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Industrial Engineering and Enterprise Information, Tunghai University, Taichung, 407, Taiwan

    Chin-Yin Huang & Chung-Yu Pan

  2. Department of Computer Science and Information Management, Providence University, Taichung, Taiwan

    Wu-Lin Chen

  3. Innolux Display Corporation, Miaoli, Taiwan

    Chia-Ming Cheng

Authors
  1. Chin-Yin Huang
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  2. Wu-Lin Chen
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  3. Chia-Ming Cheng
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  4. Chung-Yu Pan
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Chin-Yin Huang.

Appendices

Appendix 1

See Table 10.

Table 10 Thirty data sets for developing the prognostic model
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Appendix 2

See Table 11.

Table 11 Inputs of Manufacturing conditions for robustness test (each row represents a case)
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Huang, CY., Chen, WL., Cheng, CM. et al. Product quality prognosis in plastic injection moulding. Prod. Eng. Res. Devel. 5, 59–71 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11740-010-0269-7

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