Optimization of process conditions in gas-assisted injection molding

Gas-assisted injection molding has been widely used to provide promising so lutions to problems in conventional molding. With additional process parame ters introduced, optimization in gas-assisted injection molding is much mor e complex than in conventional injection molding. This paper proposes an au tomated design methodology for gas-assisted injection molding with robustne ss in consideration. By introducing a definition of gas penetration cost, t he optimization problems dealing with multiple quality issues can be modele d as constrained optimization problems, with the gas penetration cost as ma in objective function and other quality quantities as constraints. A direct search-based optimization procedure, the Complex method. is used to optimi ze a bounded single-criterion problem. To illustrate the proposed methodolo gy, a case study is carried out on simulation results.