Injection molding process monitoring and process control can help you achieve several goals: improved process quality, higher-quality products and lower overall costs — to name a few. Injection molding process control can also help you stay on top of secondary aspects of your manufacturing process, such as injection mold life cycle and other equipment factors that play a role in different areas of your budget and overhead. If you’re not familiar with injection molding process monitoring, or have heard the term but aren’t quite sure about the full meaning, let’s back up and take a look at exactly what it is. On the surface, the term seems self-explanatory: it’s a way of monitoring quantitative aspects of your molding process. However, there’s more that makes up the meat of what injection molding process monitoring and control do — and what the benefits are. The components that comprise an effective injection molding…

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Injection molding defects: they happen, even to the most experienced and knowledgeable operators out there. Don’t listen to anyone who tells you that molding defects are purely symptomatic of inexperience or inattention — it’s simply not the case. Any number of causes can contribute to molding defects: standard process margins of error, differences from one batch of material to another, changes in machine calibration after repairs or maintenance, ambient environmental factors, and more. And yes, experience can play a role as well, but in a broad range of forms. For instance, a long-time operator working with a machine for the first time may not be familiar with its quirks and particularities, leading to unavoidable errors. There are many types of injection molding defects, but some are more common than others. What this means in practice is that there are more factors that can cause some defects than others, and thus…

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Step 1: Design your part. Step 2: Prototype and iterate on it to optimize your design. Step 3: Move forward to production. Wouldn’t it be nice if product development were that easy? By now, you probably have a pretty good idea that it’s not. There are a few more steps (and sub-steps, and repeated steps, and so on) and considerations of the plastic injection molding process to factor in, which is likely why you’re here. Material selection for injection molding is a primary consideration among these. While the process of “material selection” certainly merits a step of its own, in many ways, it’s something that’s both affected by, and can have an impact on, most (if not all) other steps — and will definitely have an effect on the final step in development: production. The particulars of how you carry out your resin selection process are best defined by you…

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