A Study of Hybrid Optimization of Injection Moulding Process Parameters for Plastic Gear

This paper presents a hybrid optimization method for optimizing the injection moulding process parameters for plastic gear. This proposed method combines the Taguchi robust design, grey relational analysis (GRA) and principal component analysis (PCA) in designing the experiments and analyzing the behaviour of shrinkage in addendum circles (AC), dedendum circles (DC) and tooth thickness (TT) of the moulded gear. The proposed hybrid optimization method appears to be a necessity to overcome the shortcomings in multiple quality characteristics optimization as well as provides a statistical solution in defining a weight for each quality characteristic.