Design Engineering for the Capital Equipment Industry

In order to produce quality plastic parts consistently and quickly, the injection molding machine used to produce the parts must meet rigorous standards. The platens in which the force is transmitted to the molds must be held to tight deflection tolerances and all of the components must withstand load cycling over long periods of operation.

• • Unacceptably high deflection will produce inferior parts.
  • Structural failure due to cyclic loading can cause catastrophic machine failure, injury and, costly shut down.

Working as part of our customer’s product development team, Kx analyzed each of the three platens for all machines and iterated to optimum designs. In particular, we wanted to reduce the weight of these castings, especially of the moving platen, to allow for shorter cycle time and more parts per hour.

As an additional check, the machine bases were also analyzed. Any compliance in the base can introduce a mis-match in the mold faces. This, in turn, can lead to inferior parts and unwanted flash at the parting line due to separation of the moving and stationary molds.

In the end, six new prototype machines were designed and built that met all of the stress and deflection criteria.