Injection foam molding of open-celled porous duct

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#In today's competitive automotive industry, every automaker is investing significant amount of its resource to accomplish two objectives: (1) reduce manufacturing costs; and (2) minimize the weight of vehicles to improve fuel efficiency. These efforts affect every single part of vehicle and the porous duct, which is an integral component of the air-intake system, is a prime example that would benefit from those efforts significantly. MAHLE Filter Systems Canada is one of the chief manufacturers of porous ducts, and their current porous duct is manufactured with fiber-woven materials. However, it is very costly to produce because of its high material cost and the complex manufacturing process to fabricate it. MAHLE Filter Systems Canada is, therefore, eager to substitute the existing fiber-woven porous ducts with plastic porous ones without compromising their required properties. With the implementation of economical injection molding process, the manufacturing cost would be reduced substantially. In addition, the material cost would be decreased significantly by utilizing inexpensive polymers and fillers. Thus, the proposed alternative has extremely high potential for a positive economic impact on the company. Since the company does not have any significant experience with the processes such as injection foam molding and creating a porous structure using leaching, the Microcellular Plastics Manufacturing Laboratory (MPML) at the University of Toronto is exceptionally capable to meet the company's needs because it has profound knowledge and experience on the processes. The long-term objective of this joint research program is to produce porous plastic duct as an alternative to the current expensive fiber-woven porous ducts. In order to accomplish this ultimate goal, we are proposing an approach that consists of four short-term goals: (i) the identification of the ideal base resin; (ii) the exploration of the structure-property relationship of plastic open-celled foams using various materials and processing parameters; (iii) the determination of the optimal open-cell morphology for the required properties; and (iv) the extensive investigation of the processing-structure relationship of plastic open-celled foams.