Inventive Design Applied to Injection Molding

Increasing competition forces companies to put products on the market as soon as possible, hence the need for research in concurrent engineering. Invention is the second main issue: since today products must be cheaper and better than the competition’s. This requires technological invention, which in turn necessitates research in creativity and problem solving theories. Our research interests are within these two academic domains: concurrent engineering processes and inventive solutions to technical problems. Starting from the specific situation of injection molding design, we identified the need to develop a new modeling approach for product and manufacturing molds that could link the powerful OTSM-TRIZ theory with concurrent engineering. We build our contribution on the parametric design model and cause-effect relationships; we propose guidelines to analyze and synthesize the resulting complex contradiction network in a single inventive redesign task. A plastic valve stem design is used for validation of the proposed approach.