Five Gallon High Speed Core Cap Re-design of Polymer Injection Mold

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Calframax Technologies Inc. is a plastic injection mold manufacturer with customers located mostly in NorthAmerica. The typical cycle time to process a 5-gallon pail has been 18 to 19 seconds. Calframax undertook toresearch and develop a mold that could produce parts at a significantly shorter process time of 13.5 to 14.5seconds. This increase in efficiency allows the customers to increase their production rate by 30%. Because ofthe increased efficiency of the new mold design, many of the Calframax customers replaced their molds withthe new design. The mold has now been in circulation for approximately 3 years, however, several ofcustomers are experiencing quality problems with the new design. The problems include corrosion on themating surface between the core and core cap, corrosion and breakage of the screws, and hobbing of the core.Initial investigations indicate that the core cap is also flexing under injection pressure. Therefore, in thisresearch the corrosion resistance of the problematic parts in a standard coolant as well as stress corrosioncracking, fatigue corrosion, and galvanic reaction of the components in the same coolant will be investigated.Then based on the results of the experiments, materials or coatings at reasonable cost with minimum corrosionrate and galvanic potential will be selected. Then a proper corrosion inhibitor for the coolant will be suggestedto minimize the corrosion damage to the parts. This project will generate important new knowledge on thematerials behavior and design considerations of the polymer injection molds. This type of knowledge is criticalto Calframax for improvement of their new mold products. The results of this project may lead to the designand introduction of a range of new mold products within a time span of 3 to 5 years and increase theprofitability of Calframax.