An Investigation to Reduce the Effect of Moisture on Injection-Molded Parts through Optimization of Plasticization Parameters

An Investigation to Reduce the Effect of Moisture on Injection-Molded Parts through Optimization of Plasticization Parameters

Blog Article

Plastic materials can absorb moisture from the atmosphere even after drying.This absorbed moisture can cause many defects in the molding process.Conventionally, a dryer is used to reduce the moisture content.However, the use of a drying unit involves huge daily power consumption and is also time-consuming.

Therefore, this study proposed a new method to reduce the impact of moisture on molded product part quality through the optimization of plasticization parameters while reducing drying time.Two plastic materials, polyurethane (TPU) 7201 diablosport predator 2 and polycarbonate (PC), were used for the experimental verification.Key plasticization parameters, including back pressure, screw rotation speed, and barrel temperature were chosen; their influence was investigated by the design of experiments (DOE).Moisture-induced defects, such as air bubble area, part surface gloss, and appearance were measured and correlated with the plasticization parameters.

It was found, after optimization via a three-level DOE and factorial design multivariate statistical analysis using TPU, that the gloss (GU) of the nightstick twm-850xl PC part without drying was very close to that (98.4 GU) of the fully dried PC.The proposed methodology may help molders to improve production efficiency and achieve cost savings.