Optimization of Part Wall Thicknesses to Reduce Warpage of Injection-Molded Parts Based on The Modified Complex Method

Abstract

The objective of this work is to minimize warpage of injection-molded parts by deliberately varying each part wall thickness within prescribed dimensional tolerance. The continuous design space of wall thicknesses is explored in search of the optimum wall thickness for given process conditions. The objective function to be minimized is the numeric warpage value, which requires extensive computational time. Once the wall thicknesses are optimized, the warpage is reduced further by optimizing the six significant process variables: injection time, postfill (cooling plus packing) time, packing time, packing pressure, melt temperature, and coolant temperature. As a solution methodology, the modified complex method has been developed and applied in two example parts, where a reduction in warpage of over 70% has been obtained with a moderate number of function evaluations.