OPTIMIZATION OF PROCESS CONDITIONS IN GAS-ASSISTED INJECTION MOLDING

Gas-assisted injection molding has been widely used to provide promising solutions to problems in conventional molding. With additional process parameters introduced, optimization in gas-assisted injection molding is much more complex than in conventional injection molding. This paper proposes an automated design methodology for gas-assisted injection molding with robustness in consideration. By introducing a definition of gas penetration cost, the optimization problems dealing with multiple quality issues can be modeled as constrained optimization problems, with the gas penetration cost as main objective function and other quality quantities as constraints. A direct search-based optimization procedure, the Complex method, is used to optimize a bounded single-criterion problem. To illustrate the proposed methodology, a case study is carried out on simulation results.