Plastic industry is one of the world’s fastest growing
industries, ranked as one of the few billion-dollar industries.
Almost every product that is used in daily life involves the
usage of plastic and most of these products can be produced
by plastic injection molding method [1]. Plastic injection
molding process is well known as the manufacturing process
to create products with various shapes and complex geometry
at low cost [2].
The plastic injection molding process is a cyclic process.
There are four significant stages in the process. These stages
are filling, packing, cooling and ejection. The plastic injec-
tion molding process begins with feeding the resin and the
appropriate additives from the hopper to the heating/injection
system of the injection plastic injection molding machine [3].
This is the “filling stage” in which the mould cavity is filled
with hot polymer melt at injection temperature. After the cav-
ity is filled, in the “packing stage”, additional polymer melt is
packed into the cavity at a higher pressure to compensate the
expected shrinkage as the polymer solidifies. This is followed
by “cooling stage” where the mould is cooled until the part is
sufficiently rigid to be ejected. The last step is the “ejection
stage” in which the mould is opened and the part is ejected,
after which the mould is closed again to begin the next cycle
[4].
The design and manufacture of injection molded poly-
meric parts with desired properties is a costly process domi-
nated by empiricism, including the repeated modification of
actual tooling. Among the task of mould design, designing
the mould specific supplementary geometry, usually on the
core side, is quite complicated by the inclusion of projection
and depression [5].
In order to design a mould, many important designing
factors must be taken into consideration. These factors are
mould size, number of cavity, cavity layouts, runner systems,
gating systems, shrinkage and ejection system [6].
In thermal analysis of the mould, the main objective is
to analyze the effect of thermal residual stress or molded-in