The Effect of Control Factors and the Effect of CaCO3 on the Microcellular Foam Morphology

Abstract Microcellular foamed plastics by injection molder draw attraction due to light weight, less warp, reduced cycle time, less sink mark, and so on, because of cells nucleated in the polymer matrix during the injection. Although foamed plastics by injection molder have many merits as listed above, there are few studies which factors are influencing on the foam morphology that characterize the quality of foamed plastics due to the complexity of injection molding. We studied the effect of control factors of injection molding and the effect of CaCO3 as an additive for nucleation on the cell morphology according to the design of experiments. We analyzed the effects of each factor by using SEM images of foamed plastics through Minitab software using main effect plot, interaction plot, and ANOVA.