Design and fabrication of multi-cavity injection mold using hot runners and direct edge gates

Abstract

A hot runner system can provide many advantages to plastic injection mold engineers for improving product quality. In edge gate systems in particular, the gate traces can appear on the side of products rather than the top. However, it is difficult to establish hot runner systems using edge gates because of their structural differences from conventional gate systems. This article presents the entire process of preparing a 48-cavity plastic injection molding system with edge gates. This process consists of 48-cavity injection mold design, structural analysis, verification of design plans, filling analysis of multi-cavity, cooling channel design on the basis of cooling analysis, fabrication of the mold system, and test injection. All presented computer-aided engineering analyses were conducted using ANSYS and MoldFlow.

Keywords

Optimal design injection mold direct edge gate multi-cavity hot runner

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