A study of birefringence, residual stress and final shrinkage for precision injection molded parts

Precision injection molding process is of great importance since precision optical products such as CD, DVD and various lens are manufactured by those process. In such products, birefringence affects the optical performance while residual stress that determines the geometric precision level. Therefore, it is needed to study residual stress and birefringence that affect deformation and optical quality, respectively in precision optical product. In the present study, we tried to predict residual stress, final shrinkage and birefringence in injection molded parts in a systematic way, and compared numerical results with the corresponding experimental data. Residual stress and birefringence can be divided into two parts, namely flow induced and thermally induced portions. Flow induced birefringence is dominant during the flow, whereas thermally induced stress is much higher than flow induced one when amorphous polymer undergoes rapid cooling across the glass transition region. A numerical system that is able to predict birefringence, residual stress and final shrinkage in injection molding process has been developed using hybrid finite element-difference method for a general three dimensional thin part geometry. The present modeling attempts to integrate the analysis of the entire process consistently by assuming polymeric materials as nonlinear viscoelastic fluids above a no-flow temperature and as linear viscoelastic solids below the no-flow temperature, while calculating residual stress, shrinkage and birefringence accordingly. Thus, for flow induced ones, the Leonov model and stress-optical law are adopted, while the linear viscoelastic model, photoviscoelastic model and free volume theory taking into account the density relaxation phenomena are employed to predict thermally induced ones. Special cares are taken of the modeling of the lateral boundary condition which can consider product geometry, histories of pressure and residual stress. Deformations at and after ejection have been considered using thin shell viscoelastic finite element method. There were good correspondences between numerical results and experimental data if final shrinkage, residual stress and birefringence were compared.