Eventos Anais de eventos
COBEM 2023
27th International Congress of Mechanical Engineering
DfA-based Practices Guide for Polymer Injection Mold Assembly Design
Submission Author:
Régis Scalice , SC , Brazil
Co-Authors:
Régis Scalice, Micaela Sanches Galicio
Presenter: Micaela Sanches Galicio
doi://10.26678/ABCM.COBEM2023.COB2023-0710
Abstract
The constant evolution of products has generated more complex design requirements, with more information and aggregated technologies, reduced life cycles, and an increase in market competitiveness, making it increasingly necessary to optimize the entire product design and manufacturing process. One of the aspects to be optimized, primarily, is the assembly of the product, where the project is aimed to decompose, reduce, standardize, and simplify the stages of assembly, reducing the amount of work, increasing the quality of the product, and, possibly, reducing the number of parts used and standardizing them. In this way, the Design for Manufacturing (DfA) represents the interaction of the product design with the components of the manufacturing system so that they are easy to manufacture. Through DfA the number of steps, costs, efforts, and production time can be reduced, enabling increased quality. This work aims to demonstrate the principles, rules, and design guidelines for assembly applied to polymer injection molds since these tools are usually designed specifically for each part to be produced, generating excessive operations and assembly time. Although each injection mold is unique, there is a design uniformity of its components for most molds, which makes it possible to simplify and optimize assembly. In this work, a set of 12 guidelines based on the usual practices of DfA is presented. Their feasibility of application to the design of molds is evaluated and analyzed through a series of application case studies. These guidelines include solutions such as: minimizing the use of separate fasteners, using an efficient assembly sequence, and avoiding components with characteristics that make identification difficult. As a result, there are possibilities of obtaining simplified, reliable molds with lower costs, eliminating the need to create unnecessary drawings and specifications, reducing the search for suppliers and manufacturing of parts, and obtaining an injection mold with fewer parts that is easier and faster to assemble.
Keywords
DFA, Design for Assembly, injection mold
