• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.20 no.7
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• pp.607-612
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• 2019

The softness of the crashpad part is one of the important factors which affect the interior perceived quality of the vehicle interior. And while improving the softness of the crashpad part, every effort to lower the production cost has been going on. The PU foaming process for the crashpad part depends on the understanding of a lot of processes, tools and material properties. Therefore, to achieve the requirement of the customer for the interior part's visual quality, the integrated design techniques are investigated to correlate the processes, tool design, material design and the computer aided analysis. In this paper, IMG (In Mold Grain) designed concept is firstly developed to integrate the skin preforming, plastic injection molding of the substrate and the foaming process in a tool within reduced processes. Through the application of this technology, softness of crashpad is improved by 40% compared to the conventional vacuum molding method, and the existing process is reduced by 50% by integrating the injection process and the manufacturing process. And by integrating the injection mold and the skin mold and removing the foaming mold, the number of molds are reduced from 3 to 1, resulting in 20% reduction in the cost of applying a medium-sized passenger car.