What is a gate? A gate is a small opening (or orifice) through which the polymer melt enters the cavity. Gate design for a particular application includes selection of the gate type, dimensions,and location. It is dictated by the part and mold design, the part...

Essentials of a well-designed gate A properly designed gate will deliver a rapid, uniform, and preferably uni-directional mold filling pattern with a proper gate freeze-off time. Gate location The gate location should be at the thickest area of the part, preferably at...

Design Example: Optimizing gates and ram speed profile Purpose of this example This example illustrates various aspects of the power of CAE software for the plastics industry, and how such software can be strategically applied. It shows how to put into practice many...

Mold cooling system overview Importance of cooling system design Mold cooling accounts for more than two-thirds of the total cycle time in the production of injection molded thermoplastic parts. Figure 1 illustrates this point. An efficient cooling circuit design...

Cooling-channel configuration Types of cooling channels Cooling-channel configurations can be serial or parallel. Both configurations are illustrated in Figure 1 below. FIGURE 1. Cooling-channel configurations Parallel cooling channels Parallel cooling channels are...

What do they do? Baffles and bubblers are sections of cooling lines that divert the coolant flow into areas that would normally lack cooling. Cooling channels are typically drilled through the mold cavity and core. The mold, however, may consist of areas too far away...

Cooling time Theoretically, cooling time is proportional to the square of the heaviest part wall thickness or the power of 1.6 for the largest runner diameter. That is: where the thermal diffusivity of polymer melt is defined as In other words, doubling the wall...

A culprit in shrinkage and warpage problems Residual stress is a process-induced stress, frozen in a molded part. It can be either flow-induced or thermal-induced. Residual stresses affect a part similarly to externally applied stresses. If they are strong enough to...