Abstract
In various manufacturing industries, an in-mold decoration (IMD) process for plastic objects is widely utilized because a film forming and an injection molding processes run simultaneously. In the present study, the deformation of polymer film and filling of resin in the IMD process were numerically investigated to evaluate the quality of the plastic object formed by the IMD process, which consists of thermoforming and injection molding processes. To obtain the initial shape of the polymer film during the injection molding process, the deformation of the polymer film in the thermoforming process was pre-formed using the vacuum conditions to attach the film to a cavity. Since the properties and deformation of polymer film are greatly affected by the behavior of polymer resin being injected into a mold cavity, numerical simulations for the injection molding and film forming were performed with one-way coupling method. The results showed that the injected resin could lead to the tearing of the polymer film in local regions near the corners. In order to verify the proposed numerical methodology, the numerical results of the deformation patterns printed on the initial polymer film were compared with the experimental data. The proposed methodology to couple film forming analysis with injection molding analysis can be used to predict the deformation of film in IMD process.
