Moldflow Simulation and Characterization of Pure Copper Fabricated via Metal Injection Molding

Abstract

Metal injection molding (MIM) is a representative near-net-shape manufacturing process that fabricates advanced geometrical components for automobile and device industries. As the mechanical performance of an MIM product is affected by green-part characteristics, this work investigated the green part of pure copper processed with MIM using the injection temperature of ~180 °C and injection pressure of ~5 MPa. A computational analysis based on the Moldflow program was proposed to simulate the effectivity of the process by evaluating the confidence of fill, quality prediction, and pressure drop of three distinctive regions in the green part. The results showed that the ring and edge regions of the green parts showed localized behavior, which was related to processing parameters including the position of the gate. A microstructural observation using scanning electron microscopy and a 3D X-ray revealed that both the surface and body matrix consisted of pores with some agglomeration of micro-pores on the edges and ring part, while any critical defects, such as a crack, were not found. A microhardness analysis showed that the three regions exhibited a reasonable uniformity with a slight difference in one specific part mainly due to the localized pore agglomeration. The simulation results showed a good agreement with the microstructures and microhardness data. Thus, the present results are useful for providing guidelines for the sound condition of MIM-treated pure copper with a complex shape.

Advanced Injection Molding Methods: Review

“…Metal injection molding is an advanced manufacturing technique that allows the molding of metal parts with complex shapes and precise dimensions using a process similar to traditional plastic injection molding [194,195]. Taking a rheological approach, the feedstock for metal-IM technology is a suspension.…”

Micro-Gear Point Cloud Segmentation Based on Multi-Scale Point Transformer

“…Based on this, the present study employs Metal Injection Molding [11][12][13][14][15][16] (MIM) technology and designs experiments based on factorial design [17], producing gears and using a 3D structured light scanner to collect point cloud data of all gear shapes throughout the MIM process, thereby constructing a dataset containing 1101 point cloud datasets of small gears. Subsequently, the gears are manually annotated and segmented.…”