Although thermoplastic materials are mostly derived from petro-chemicals, it would be highly desirable, from a sustainability perspective, to produce them instead from renewable biopolymers. Unfortunately, biopolymers exhibiting thermoplastic behaviour and which preserve their mechanical properties post processing are essentially non-existent. The robust sucker ring teeth (SRT) from squid and c...

This paper presents measurements of acoustic emission (AE) signals during the injection molding of polypropylene with new and damaged mold. The damaged injection mold has cracks induced by laser surface heat treatment. Standard test specimens were injection molded, commonly used for examining the shrinkage behavior of various thermoplastic materials. The measured AE burst signals during injecti...

This application uses live data from a thermoplastic injection molding manufacturer to examine the feasibility and effectiveness of using backpropagation artificial neural networks for predictive quality control. Preprocessing and post processing of live data, formulating neural predictive strategies, selecting architecture and parameters, and handling of temporal aspects are topics. Performanc...

thermoplastic honeycombs based on polypropylene are one of the latest types of cores used in sandwich structures. up to now there have been few experimental and modelling studies on the mechanical behaviour of sandwich structures with thermoplastic cores. in this paper, by considering the similar properties of foams and thermoplastic honeycombs, attempts are made to model the static indentation...

A stiffness-based ejection condition for injection molding is introduced and utilized for evaluation of different polymer materials. Comparison with industrial practice and other commonly used ejection criteria, such as molded part temperature, indicates that this approach not only can be an alternative when the ejection temperature of the polymer part is unavailable, but also is able to better...

Recently, thermoplastic polymers have become popular materials for microfluidic chips due to their easy fabrication and low cost. A polymer based microfluidic device can be formed in various fabrication techniques such as laser machining, injection molding, and hot embossing. A new bonding process presented in this paper uses a 2.5% (w/w) polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA) solution as an adhesive l...

Designing cooling channels for the thermoplastic injection process is a very important step in mold design. A conformal cooling channel can significantly improve the efficiency and the quality of production in plastic injection molding. This paper introduces an approach to generate spiral channels for conformal cooling. The cooling channels designed by our algorithms has very simple connectivit...

coinjection, injection compression, gas assist molding, etc.), Process control has been recognized as an important means of improving the performance and consistency of thermoplastic parts. However, no single control strategy or system design has been universally accepted, and the manufacturing systems continue to produce defective components during production. This paper provides an overview s...

This application uses live data from a thermoplastic injection moulding manufacturer to examine the feasibility and effectivehess of using backpropagation artificial neural networks for predictive quality control. Preprocessing and post processing of live data, formulating neural predictive strategies, selecting architecture and parameters, and handling of temporal aspects are topics. Performan...