Abstract
Polymers such as polypropylene or polyethylene offer a unique feature of producing an integral hinge, which can flex over a million times without causing a failure. With such advantage manufacturing, time and cost required at the assembly stage can be eliminated by injecting the whole part as one piece. However, due to increased fluidity resistance at hinges during molding, several defects such as short shot or premature hinge failure can occur with the improper selection of gate locations. Therefore, it is necessary to optimize flow balancer in injection molding of part with hinges before actually producing molds. In this paper, resin flow patterns depending on several gate positions were investigated by numerical analyses of a simple strip part with a hinge. As a result, we found that the properly determined gate location leads to better resin flow and shorter hesitation time. Finally, injection molding tryouts using a mold that was designed one of the proposed gate systems were conducted using polypropylene that contained 20% talc. The experiment showed that hinges without defects could be produced by using the designed gate location.