Investigation of cell nucleation and growth in high-pressure and low-pressure foam injection molding

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The industry urgently needs to improve its existing foam injection molding technology so that its functions are enhanced and its manufacturing costs are decreased. Foam injection molding technology is one solution to the challenges faced by many industries such as automotive, construction, aerospace, and packaging. The goal is to achieve lightweight products using lightweight materials and to improve their functionality while giving them the necessary mechanical properties.** There are some design and analysis software for the injection molders to use for simulating mold-filling, weld-line location, warpage analysis, and temperature distribution successfully for unfoamed solid parts. However, there is absolutely no software that can accurately predict and analyze the foam injection molding process within the mold cavity. ** Our industrial partner, Autodesk Moldflow, is the leader of injection molding simulation software. But the current simulation module provided by Autodesk Moldflow can describe only marginally the low-pressure foaming phenomena by fitting the cell nucleation behaviors for each material. In this context, Autodesk initiated this collaborative project, to dramatically improve its Microcellular Module. This will be accomplished through our new collaboration and by applying our visualization mold, which can accurately visualize the foaming phenomena. The overall approach is as follows: (i) to visualize the foaming behaviour and to analyze the observed images in order to improve our understanding of the fundamental mechanisms of the cell nucleation and growth inside the mold; (ii) to implement the identified foaming mechanism(s) to simulation software modules so as to describe the foam injection molding in a way that is closer to how it actually occurs. **