Application Fields of Injection Molds

Application Fields of Injection Molds

Injection molds are vital tool for manufacturing a wide range of industrial products. Fueled by the rapid advancement of the plastics industry and the extensive adoption of plastic products across aviation, aerospace, electronics, machinery, shipbuilding, automotive and other industrial sectors, performance requirements for molds have become increasingly stringent. Conventional mold design methodologies can no longer meet modern production demands. Compared with traditional mold design, Computer Aided Engineering (CAE) technology delivers overwhelming advantages in boosting productivity, guaranteeing product quality, cutting production costs and reducing labor intensity.

A full spectrum of numerical control (NC) machining technologies are deployed in injection mold fabrication, among which NC milling machines and machining centers see the most widespread use. NC wire electrical discharge machining (WEDM) and NC electrical discharge machining (EDM) are also commonplace in mold NC processing. Wire EDM is primarily used for machining molds with straight sidewalls, such as male and female stamping dies, inserts and sliders of injection molds, as well as electrodes for EDM operations. For mold components with extremely high hardness that cannot be machined via conventional cutting processes, EDM is the dominant solution. It is also adopted for intricate mold features including sharp corners, deep cavities and narrow slots. NC lathes are mainly utilized to fabricate standard shaft-type mold components and rotary mold cavities or cores—examples include injection molds for bottles and basins, as well as forging dies for shaft and disk workpieces. NC drilling machines also contribute to higher machining precision and shorter production lead times in mold manufacturing.

Molds enjoy extremely broad applications. Forming processing of nearly all product components in modern manufacturing relies on molds. Accordingly, the mold industry constitutes a key segment of national high-tech industries and represents a valuable core technical resource. The development trends of mold manufacturing technology over the next 5 to 20 years will encompass the following directions:

1. Optimize the structural design of mold systems and the CAD/CAE/CAM workflow of mold inserts, and advance intelligentization; raise the standards of molding processes and mold standardization; enhance mold manufacturing precision and quality; and reduce the workload of surface grinding and polishing as well as overall production cycles of mold inserts.

2. Research and deploy high-performance, free-cutting specialized materials tailored to various mold inserts to upgrade mold service performance.

3. Adopt rapid prototyping and rapid tooling technologies to quickly fabricate forming stamping dies, plastic injection molds, die-casting molds and more, so as to accommodate diversified market demands and new product trial production.