Visualization of Injection Moulding Process

A special tool-transparent mould designed to visualize the melt flow inside the cavity is used in this research. The aim of the work is to assess the polymer melt behavior under different processing conditions-close to industrial, in conventional and two materials non-conventional injection moulding techniques. The mould is designed with two injection locations and has possibility to change the geometry of the cavity in order to investigate the melt behavior in differently shaped cavities. Visual access in the mould is allowed by the sapphire windows, surrounding the cavity. For image acquisition a high speed video camera NAC 1000 is used. Materials used in the research are three polypropylenes with different flow index. Results are obtained for conventional injection moulding, two material monosandwich and two material biinjection moulding. Apart from visualization, instrumentation of the mould allows to be obtained PT data for each processing condition. Results from conventional injection moulding are compared with MPI5.0 simulations.