Cs. Li et Yk. Shen, OPTIMUM DESIGN OF RUNNER SYSTEM BALANCING IN INJECTION-MOLDING, International communications in heat and mass transfer, 22(2), 1995, pp. 179-188
The runner-system design is of great importance to achieve a successfu
l injection molding process of a family mold with multiple cavities. U
sing a Galerkin finite element method to simulate the flow of a one-di
mensional tube runner-system including phase change in detail we prese
nt a power law model. The difference between the pressure and temperat
ure at the gate entrance of all cavities can be taken as the objective
function to be minimized because if all cavities are filled simultane
ously, these pressure and temperature variations should be a minimum.
The purpose is to fill all cavities at the same instant under the same
conditions in order to prevent flashing of the mold and to produce pa
rts of improved and uniform quality. In this paper we present a feasib
le means to optimize the runner design automatically by integrating op
timization theory with a flow/thermo-simulation program.