• Transactions of Materials Processing
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• v.14 no.5 s.77
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• pp.452-459
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• 2005

Gas assisted injection molding (GAIM) is an innovative low-pressure injection molding technique that can provide numerous benefits such as reduced part warpage, excellent surface quality without sink marks, low injection pressure and greater design flexibility. However, adoptions of GAIM may cause unexpected defects since it requires many subtle design factors such as resin shot size, delay time and gas injection pressure, which wouldn't be considered in conventional injection molding process. Therefore, experiences applying GAIM should be collected and examined in order to establish design rules of the new technique. The purpose of this paper is to summarize developing cases of three automotive interior parts such as instrument panel, map pocket folding and center facia side panel so that possibilities and limitations of GAIM were examined. As a result, it is necessary to consider characteristics of GAIM at the initial stage of part design in order to obtain various advantages of the GAIM process without occurring severe defects, which would increase time and cost required to the part development.