• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers
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• v.17 no.6
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• pp.1465-1477
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• 1993

Powder Injection Molding(PM) is an advanced and complicated technology for manufacturing ceramic or metal products making use of a conventional injection molding process, which is generally used for plastic products. Among many technologies involved in the successful PIM, injection molding process is one of the key steps to form a desired shape out of powder/binder mixtures. Thus, it is of great importance to have a numerical tool to predict the powder injection molding filling process. In this regard, a finite element analysis system has been developed for numerical simulations of filling process of powder injection molding. Powder/polymer mixtures during the filling pro cess of injection molding can be rheologically characterized as Non-Newtonian fluids with a so called yield phenomena and have a peculiar feature of apparent slip phenomena on the wall boundaries surrounding mold cavity. Therefore, in the present study, a physical modeling of the filling process of powder/polymer mixtures was developed to take into account both the yield stress and slip phenomena and a finite element formulation was developed accordingly. The numerical analysis scheme for filling simulation is accomplished by combining a finite element method with control volume technique to simulate the movement of flow front and a finite difference method to calculate the temperature distribution. The present study presents the modeling, numerical scheme and some numerical analysis results showing the effect of the yield stress and slip phenomena.