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pps proceeding
Symposium: S11 - Additive Manufacturing
Oral Presentation
 
 

Rapid Manufacturing through Additive Technologies - the case of hybrid injection molds

Sampaio Álvaro M. (1)*, Silva Eva (1), Barros Patrícia (1), Pontes António J. (1)

(1) Institute for Polymers and Composites and DONE Lab from the University of Minho - Guimarães - Portugal

Rapid Manufacturing (RM) is a term that embraces Rapid Prototyping (RP) and Rapid Tooling (RT)) and that is widely seen as a strategy, to quickly make products or tools for several types of applications. In some cases, depending on the requirements of the parts, the techniques of RM have successfully replaced the conventional methods of manufacturing. RP is a technique used for quickly create physical models and functional prototypes directly from CAD models. The production of the part is usually done using Additive Manufacturing (AM) technologies. RT had two approaches: The indirect approach in which the molds were produced from master patterns produced by RP; and the direct approach in which the molds were produced directly in AM systems. The integration of molding blocks obtained by AM and standard mold structures originated the designation of Hybrid Molds (HM) for the resulting tools. The most frequent case of application of HM is the production of small series or the so-called bridge development with the desire to market a product before producing a mold for large-scale production. Nowadays, besides recent innovations in AM materials and technologies, there are still difficulties, in terms of dimensional quality, in the production of plastic technical parts produced by HM. Therefore, this paper presents a research centered in the evaluation of the quality of injection molding parts in terms of dimensional accuracy and roughness obtained by HM. To achieve this aim, three injection molding blocks were manufacture in different materials. Two from AM technologies (One in PPS by FDM and the other in a Photopolymer by Material Jetting) and a third in steel, that was produced in order to have a baseline. Five POM molding parts were produced in each molding block. The molding parts were measured to obtain the shrinkage and surface roughness values. By comparing results, it was possible to establish the best parameters for each HM concerning parts quality.