Automated Mould Cooling Technique for Improving Product Quality in an Injection Moulding System

ABSTRACT

The design and simulation of an Automatic water circulation process for injection mould cooling using an embedded system for temperature control in a plastic industry is the focus of this work. Injection mould cooling is one of the most important processes in the plastic manufacturing industry. More than one-third of all plastic products are injection moulded and mould cooling is essential in the production process. The optimum temperature or ejection temperature (T_EJECT) of the material to be moulded is preset in the microcontroller. This temperature depends on the melting temperature of the plastic materials being used because different plastic materials have different melting temperatures. The system senses the temperature from the source particularly high temperature source via a heat sensor such as thermocouple. The sensor output signal is conditioned and fed to the microcontroller (here, AT89C52 microcontroller is used) which drives a relay through a switching unit for switching the system to ON-OFF position. The work also describes the system control action incorporated in the hardware for obtaining the desired cooling process. The design analysis software- matlab and excel, are used for simulation in addition to Embedded C and Proteus professional. The results obtained from the process shows that it is very viable as it saves substantial consumption of power, achieves reduction in quantity of water usage in cooling and also reduces material wastage. It is more economical than the manual mould cooling method by removal of drudgery and maintaining uniform cooling process.