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Ultrasonically-assisted polymer molding: an evaluation

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conference contribution
posted on 2017-02-01, 12:05 authored by Matt Moles, Anish RoyAnish Roy, Vadim SilberschmidtVadim Silberschmidt
Energy reduction in extrusion and injection molding processes can be achieved by the introduction of ultrasonic energy. Polymer flow can be enhanced on application of ultrasonic vibration, which can reduce the thermal and pressure input requirements to produce the same molding; higher productivity may also be achieved. In this paper, a design of an ultrasound–assisted injection mold machine is explored. An extrusion-die design was augmented with a commercial 1.5 kW ultrasonic transducer and sonotrode designed to resonate close to 20 kHz with up to 100 ȝPY vibration amplitude. The design was evaluated with modal and thermal analysis using finite-element analysis software. The use of numerical techniques, including computational fluid dynamics, fluid-structure interaction and coupled Lagrangian-Eulerian method, to predict the effect of ultrasound on polymer flow was considered. A sonotrode design utilizing ceramic to enhance thermal isolation was also explored.

Funding

Innovate UK project ULTRAMELT.

History

School

  • Mechanical, Electrical and Manufacturing Engineering

Published in

44th Annual Symposium of the Ultrasonic Industry Association

Citation

MOLES, M., ROY, A. and SILBERSCHMIDT, V.V., 2016. Ultrasonically-assisted polymer molding: an evaluation. Physics Procedia, 87, pp. 61-71.

Publisher

© Elsevier

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Acceptance date

2016-10-10

Publication date

2016

Notes

This is an Open Access article published under the CC BY-NC-ND license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). This conference paper was delivered at the 44th Annual Symposium of the Ultrasonic Industry Association (UIA), Washington, DC, USA, 20th-22nd April 2015.

ISSN

1875-3892

Language

  • en

Location

Washington, DC, USA

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