A Study on Bubbles in The RIM Process

림성형 공정의 기포에 관한 연구

To shorten the delivery time for new products, a lot of prototype plastic parts manufacturing technologies have been developed including injection molding, vacuum casting, thermal forming and so on. Among them, RIM is becoming one of a important soft tooling methods to produce prototype and mass production parts within short time. Further more, as the rapid prototyping technology based tooling methods are playing an important role in prototype manufacturing industry, the utility of the RIM is increasing. But few analyses and mold design techniques have been developed so far due to its chemical and mechanical complexity during the packing and curing process. This research suggests mold gate design criteria to prevent bobbles from molded parts through simplified mathematical model and change of bubble sizes according to the geometry of the molded parts through experiments. Also this study shows the differences of bobble generation mechanism between RIM and injection molding.