In this study, in order of to reflect the mold deformation in the injection molding process to design of mold, the mold deformation was analyzed by performing flow and structural analysis. The 5 inch LGP(light guide plate) mold, platen and tie bar were modeled and applied to the analysis. The result of melt pressure from flow analysis was extracted for use as boundary conditions acting on the mold surface in the structural analysis. In order to evaluate the accuracy of simulation analysis results, injection molding was performed under the process conditions of simulation. As a results, the mold deformation during injection molding tends to be similar that of injection pressure, and it is confirmed that it shows the behavior and properties of melt resins. Compared with the simulation and experiment, the error of the maximum mold deformation in the injection phase was 4.20%.

Powder injection molding is an important manufacturing technology to mass produce superalloy components with complex shape. Injection molding step is particularly important for realizing a desired shape, which requires much time and efforts finding the optimum process condition. Therefore computer aided engineering can be very useful to find proper injection molding conditions. In this study, we have conducted a finite element method based simulation for the spiral mold test of superalloy feedstock and compared the results with experimental ones. Sensitivity analysis with both of simulation and experiment reveals that the melt temperature of superalloy feedstock is the most important factor for the full filling of mold cavity. The FEM based simulation matches well the experimental results. This study contributes to the optimization of superalloy powder injection molding process.

Translucent alumina is a potential candidate for high temperature application as a replacement of the glassor polymer. Recently, due to the increasing demand of high power light emitting diode (LED), there is a growing inter-est in the translucent alumina. Since the translucent property is very sensitive to the internal defect, such as voids insideor abnormal grain growth of sintered alumina, it is important to fabricate the defect-free product through the fabricationprocess. Powder injection molding (PIM) has been commonly applied for the fabrication of complex shaped products.Among the many parameters of PIM, the flowability of powder/binder mixture becomes more significant especially forthe shape of the cavity with thin thickness. Two different positions of the gate were applied during PIM using the disctype of die. The binder was removed by solvent extraction method and the brown compact was sintered at 1750oC for3 hours in a vacuum. The flowability was also simulated using moldflow (MPI 6.0) with two different types of gate.The effect of the flowability of powder/binder mixture on the microstructure of the sintered specimen was studied withthe analysis of the simulation result.

In this paper we presented numerical method for the simulation of powder injection molding filling process, which is one of the key processes in powder injection molding. Rheological properties of powder binder mixture such as slip phenomena and yield stress were introduced into the numerical analysis model of powder injection molding filling simulation. Numerical model can be classified into two types. One is 2.5D model which can be introduced to a arbitrary thin geometry and the other is full 3D model which can be applied to a general 3D shape. For 2.5D model we showed the validity of our CAE system with several verification examples. Finally we suggested flow analysis model for 3D powder injection molding filling simulation.