Multi-Piece molds, which consist of more than two mold pieces, are capable of producing very complex parts⎯parts that cannot be produced by the traditional molds. The tooling cost is also low for multi-piece molds, which makes it a candidate for pre-production prototyping and bridge tooling. However, designing multi-piece molds is a time-consuming task. This paper describes geometric algorithms...

The quantity of plastic parts in mechanical and electronic industry during past 2-3 decades has a tendency to grow up. Mechatronics systems, in particular, apply many parts of plastic materials. A plastic, which is one of the most versatile materials in the modern age, is widely used because this is an easiest way to get parts of complicated geometrical form and properties. The injection moldin...

In-mold assembly process has been used for manufacturing articulated structures at the macro scale. But the in-mold assembly process at the mesoscale behaves differently and poses new challenges due to reduced structural rigidity of the mesoscale premolded component. One of the major challenges that need to be addressed is that of the plastic deformation of the premolded component during the se...

centralizing and using proper transportation facilities cut down costs and traffic. hub facilities concentrate on flows to cause economic advantage of scale and multimodal transportation helps use the advantage of another transporter. a distinctive feature of this paper is proposing a new mathematical formulation for a three-stage p-hub location routing problem with simultaneous pick-ups and de...

Soft robotics is an emerging field with strong potential to serve as an educational tool due to its advantages such as low costs and shallow learning curves. In this paper, we introduce a modular and reconfigurable mold for flexible design of pneumatic soft robotic grippers. By using simple assembly kits, students at all levels are able to design and construct soft robotic grippers that vary in...

One of the most fundamental decisions when designing a mold for the plastics thermoforming process is whether to use a plug (male) mold or a cavity (female) mold design. This critical decision is often brushed over in the literature yet has the greatest single impact on part wall thickness and wall thickness variation. Other considerations when deciding on this fundamental design concept includ...

In-mold Assembly process at the mesoscale presents several manufacturing challenges. Results reported in this paper demonstrate the technical feasibility of creating rigid body mesoscale revolute joints using In-Mold Assembly process. The following new results are reported in this paper. First, we describe a mold design with varying cavity shape to perform In-Mold Assembly. This mold design use...