A Laboratory Experience in Polymers Engineering

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The emphasis of this project is the acquisition of equipment, computers, and software in order to provide undergraduate students in the Department of Materials Engineering with a strong laboratory experience in polymers engineering. This focus is accomplished by providing the students with a "complete" engineering experience. They use fundamental knowledge and apply it to a creative design sequence in order to solve a practical problem in polymer engineering. Specific goals of the effort are to introduce the students to state-of-the-art software used in the industry for design and optimization of injection molding molds and to injection molding processing parameters; to provide the students opportunities in the operation and principles of injection molding; and to allow the students the opportunity to compare their predictions from the software to real part fabrication. To achieve these goals, the contents of a currently offered course can be revised. In order to improve the teaching effectiveness and alleviate the current problems, the project develops laboratory modules focusing on the use of C-MOLD, a state-of-the-art software package, for the prediction of flow times, pressure, temperature, warpage and shrinkage, and degree of crystallinity during fabrication of plastic parts; the experimental validation of the modeling predictions on a fully instrumented mold with pressure gages and thermocouples; and the design of a mold and the optimization of processing conditions to produce a part that the students select and design. Students give an oral presentation in which they are required to convince a manager that the part is possible to produce, an improvement over current technology, cost effective, and marketable. They also produce the technical/marketing brochure that would be used in sales.