The rapid thermal response (RTR) molding is a novel process developed to raise the temperature of mold surface rapidly to the polymer melt temperature prior to the injection stage and then cool rapidly to the ejection temperature. The resulting filling process is achieved inside a hot mold cavity by prohibiting formation of frozen layer so as to enable thin wall injection molding without filing difficulty. The present work covers flow simulation of thin wall injection molding using the RTR molding process. In order to take into account the effects of thermal boundary conditions of the RTR mold, coupled analysis with transient heat transfer simulation is suggested and compared with conventional isothermal analysis. The proposed coupled simulation approach based on solid elements provides reliable thin wall flow estimation fur both the conventional molding and the RTR molding processes

For mass production, usually injection mold has multi-cavity which is filled through geometrical balanced runner system. Despite geometrical balanced runner system, filling imbalances between cavity to cavity have always been observed. These filing imbalances are one of the most significant factors to affect quality of plastic parts when molding plastic parts in multi-cavity injection mold. Filling imbalances are results from non-symmetrical shear rate distribution within melt as it flows through the runner system. It has been possible to decrease filling imbalance by optimizing processing conditions, but it has not completely eliminated this phenomenon during injection molding processing. This paper presents a solution of these filling imbalances through using 'runner core pin'. The runner core pin which is developed in this study creates a symmetrical shear distribution within runner. As a result of using runner core pin, a remarkable improvement in reducing filling imbalance was confirmed.

The residual birefringence in molded plastic parts can be divided into two kinds of residual birefringence, i.e., the flow induced residual birefringence produced in flowing stages and the thermally induced residual birefringence produced in cooling stage. In this paper, the effect of new injection-press molding process with normal injection mold, i.e. I) injection-compression mode, ii) injection-press mode, on the distribution of birefringence was studied. It was found that the values of the birefringence was reduced at i) low clamping force and ii) longer mold opening length by injection-press molding.

Microlens arrays were fabricated using a modified LIGA process based on the exposure of a PMMA (Polymethylmethacrylate) sheet to deep x-rays and subsequent thermal treatment. A successful modeling and analyses for microlens formation were presented according to the experimental procedure. A nickel mold insert was fabricated by the nickel electroforming process on the PMMA microlens arrays fabricated by the modified LIGA process. For the replication of microlens arrays having various diameters with different foci on the same substrate, the hot embossing and the microinjection molding processes have been successfully utilized with the fabricated mold insert. Fabricated microlenses showed good surface roughness than the mold insert. The focal lengths of the injection molded microlenses were successfully measured experimentally and also estimated theoretically.

A optical head unit for nano optical probe away was developed. The optical probe array is generated by Talbot effect. The shape and thickness of microlens array(MLA) were designed to minimize the spot size at the foci of MLA. To increase the optical efficiency of the system and obtain the large tolerance for fabrication, aperture size was theoretically optimized. Then microlens illuminated aperture array(MLIAA) as an optical head unit was fabricated using a ultra violet(UV) molding process on aluminum aperture array. In this process, Al aperture array was fabricated separately using the photolithography and reactive ion etching(RIE) process. Optical properties of the generated optical probes were measured and compared at Talbot distance from the aperture array having a diameter of $1{\mu}m$ and MLIAA.

The demand for small and high-capacity optical data storage devices has rapidly increased. The areal density of optical disk is increased using higher numerical aperture objective lens and shorter wavelength source. A wafer-scale stacked micro objective lens with a numerical aperture of 0.85 and a focal length of 0.467mm for the 405nm blue- violet laser was designed and fabricated. A diffractive optical element (DOE) was used to compensate the spherical aberration of the objective lens. Among the various fabrication methods for micro DOE, the UV-replication process is more suitable for mass-production. In this study, an 8-stepped DOE pattern as a master was fabricated by photolithography and reactive ion etching process. A flexible mold was fabricated for improving the releasing properties and shape accuracy in UV-molding process. In the replication process, the effects of exposing time and applied pressure on the replication quality were analyzed. Finally, the shapes of master, mold and molded pattern were measured by optical scanning profiler. The deviation between the master and the molded DOE was less than 0.1um. The efficiency of the molded DOE was measured by DOE efficiency measurement system which consists of laser source, sample holder, aperture and optical power meter, and the measured value was $84.5\%$.

The objective of this research was to establish the size limitation of micro metal forming and analyze the formability of foil. Flat-rolled ultra thin metallic copper foil($3{\mu}m$ in thickness) was used as a forming material and foil was annealed to improve the formability at the temperature of $385^{\circ}C$. Forming die was fabricated by using etching technique of DRIE(deep reactive ion etching) and HNA isotropic etching. For the forming die and coupe. foil were vacuum packed and the forming was conducted as applying hydrostatic pressure of 250MPa to the vacuum packed unit. We successfully obtained the micro channels of $12\~14{\mu}m$ width and $9{\mu}m$ depth from micro forming process we designed. We also investigated the thickness strain distribution of foil from experiment and FE simulation result. Micro channels had a good formability of smooth surface and size accuracy. We expect that micro metal forming technology will be applied to production of micro parts.

Femtosecond laser is the latest generation pulsed laser delivering shortest pulses. Any solid materials can be machined by it. Femtosecond laser micromachining allows highest precision and minimal heat influence within the workpiece. But due to the complex physical phenomena between the laser beam and the workpiece materials, it is very difficult to determine the optimal process conditions in the femtosecond laser micromachining. In this study, a method to simulate the femtosecond laser micromachining process was proposed. And femtosecond laser micro patterning processes of chromium thin film are simulated by the proposed method using a commercial FE code, LS-Dyna. Simulation results were compared with those of experiments.

In recent, various shapes of pattern in micron or nano scale are adapted in many applications due to their good mechanical or optical properties. Light guide panel (LGP) of the LCD is one of important applications for micro pattern and micro prism shape is one of the typical patterns. Many applications have the patterns on their surface and the size of the pattern keep decreasing down to the order of micron or even under micron. On the other hand, the area to be patterned keeps enlarging. These two trends in patterned products require tooling micro patterns on large surface, which has still many technical problems to be solved mainly due to pattern size and the tooling area. In this study, we fabricate prism shape of patterns using diamond cutting tool on some metal core and plastic core like PMMA Some of cutting conditions are investigated including cutting force, cutting depth and speed for different core materials.

High speed milling experiment on the hardened mold steel (CALMAX at hardness of HRc 55) is carried out using small diameter ball endmill. Tool lift and wear characteristics under the various machining parameters are investigated. Effect of dynamic runout on the wear of the tool is also studied. For most of the cases, catastrophic chipping of tool edge is not observed and uniformly distributed wear on the flank surface of the tool is obtained. It is found that lower rate of tool wear is obtained as the cutting speed is increased. Also, high pick feed rate is found to be more favorable in terms of tool wear and material removal rate.

In this paper, the web-based monitoring system is developed for the process monitoring of mold manufacturing. The cutting force is measured by hall-sensors which is low cost and useful to be installed in machine tool indirectly. Specially, the current of main spindle in machine tool is converted into cutting force by various experiments. For effective emote monitoring, the interface that is able to offer the information of current process and cutting signal to client is establish.

In the present study, warpage characteristics of mobile phone cover through injection molding process were investigated by using design of experiments. Warpage in plastic injection molding process has a significant effect on quality of product. Effects of injection time, packing pressure, packing time, mold temperature ana melt temperature on warpage of mobile phone cover were considered by CAE analysis and experiment with Taguchi method. The degree of warpage for the injection molded product was measured by using three dimensional CMM. It was shown that temperature parameter has more significant effect on the warpage of mobile phone cover than pressure parameter.

It is well known that the family-mold has an advantage to reduce the cost for production and mold. However, defects are frequently occurred by over packing the smaller volume cavity during molding, especially whorl the family-mold has a volumetric difference between two cavities. In this study, we confirmed the cavity-filling imbalance by the temperature and the pressure sensors, and developed a variable-runner system for the cavity-filling balance. We carried out experiments fur balancing the cavity filling in the family-mold with the variable-runner system, and confirmed a balanced cavity-filing through analyzing the temperature and pressure change in each cavity as the cross-sectional area of the runner changed. We also examined the influence of the injection-speed to the balancing-capability of the variable-runner system in the experiment.

In the present study, the characteristic of warpage and flow balance for family mould, which is able to mold parts with different shapes in a mold, is considered. To obtain an optimal gate and runner system, plastic injection molding analysis with commercial code is performed. Design and manufacturing of family mould is then carried out on the basis of this computer aided engineering result. Flow balance and warpage comparisons between experiment and numerical analysis give good agreement with each other. However, it was shown that results of warpage measured by CMM was about $20\~55\%$ lower than those of numerical analysis.

In recent industry, according to pursuit the miniaturization and high-precision of machine part with development of new technology as IT, BT the development of mold manufacturing technology for mass production is accompanied. In this study, the spiral type injection mold with a $200{\mu}m$ thickness shape is made for investigation of influence for injection molding process variables and the flow length is measured through an experiment. Beside, the result of each experiment Is compared with the analysis result of CAE. Taguchi method is used in this experiment and the obtained data are analyzed using ANOVA method.

In this study, we have developed a novel wire straightener which uses the direct heating method (DHM) fer straightening the micro wire. Also, we have developed a shearing device for cutting the micro wire. In order to avoid the surface oxidization, we supplied the inert gas(Ar) during the heating process and examined the effect of gas flow rate. The effects of the tension and the current applied to the tungsten micro wires were also thoroughly studied. From various experiments and analyses, we could obtain fine straightness $(\approx1\;{\mu}m/1000\;{\mu}m)$ and roundness $(<{\pm}2{\mu}m\;/100{\mu}m)$ when the tension is $500\~~600gf$ and the current is about 1.5A. for burrfree cutting, counter-punch method which two cutters moving contrary was used. The cutting blade has various U-groove angle where upper $10^{\circ}$, $mid:25^{\circ}$, lower $0^{\circ}$. After the shearing process, we confirmed the shearing section.

This paper presents a method by which multiple holes of ultra small size can be punched simultaneously. Silicon wafers were used to fabricate punching die. Workpiece used in the present investigation were the rolled pure copper of $3{\mu}m$ in thickness and CP titanium of $1.5{\mu}m$ in thickness. The metal foils were punched with the dies and arrays of circular and rectangular holes were made. The diameter of holes ranges from $2-10{\mu}m$. The process set-up is similar to that of the flexible rubber pad forming or Guerin process. Arrays of holes were punched successfully in one step forming. The punched holes were examined in terms of their dimensions, surface qualities, and potential defect. The effects of the die hole dimension on ultra small size hole formation of the thin foil were discussed. The optimum process condition such as proper die shape and diameter-thickness ratio (d/t) were also discussed. The results in this paper show that the present method can be successfully applied to the fabrication of ultra small size hole array in a one step operation.