• International Journal of Fluid Machinery and Systems
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• v.3 no.4
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• pp.301-308
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• 2010

Quest for reliability of hydraulic runners is a concern for all mature electricity producers. The fatigue damage caused by dynamics loads is frequently the root cause of runner failure. This paper presents the damage tolerance approach based on fracture mechanics as the method chosen by Alstom and Hydro-Qu$\acute{e}$bec to predict effects of damage on runner lifetime and consequently to be use as a design method. This is sustained by a research on fracture mechanics properties of runner materials and by recommendations on the strategy to define a safety margin for design. The acquired knowledge permits to identify potential improvement of the runner lifetime without significant cost increase, like being more specific on some chemical composition or heat treatment.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Manufacturing Process Engineers
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• v.11 no.2
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• pp.60-65
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• 2012

This paper deals with an CAE analysis and optimization of injection molding for a mobile phone cover. Two design goals are established in the optimization; one is to switch over the feed system from cold runner to hot runner for the purpose of reducing material costs, and the other is to minimize the warpage in order to improve product quality. By the full-factorial experiments for design parameters, we showed that the cold runner design could be changed to the hot runner design by replacing the current resin with a new resin of higher fluidity. In addition, we could significantly reduce the warpage of the cover product under the hot runner system by optimizing packing pressure and packing time.

• International Journal of Fluid Machinery and Systems
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• v.8 no.4
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• pp.294-303
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• 2015

The present study is conducted to identify a better design and optimal number of Francis runner blades for sediment laden high head micro hydropower site, Tara Khola in the Baglung district of Nepal. The runner is designed with in-house code and Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) analysis is performed to evaluate the performance with three configurations; 11, 13 and 17 numbers of runner blades. The three sets of runners were also investigated for the sediment erosion tendency. The runner with 13 blades shows better performance at design as well as in variable discharge conditions. 96.2% efficiency is obtained from the runner with 13 blades at the design point, and the runners with 17 and 11 blades have 88.25% and 76.63% efficiencies respectively. Further, the runner with 13 blades has better manufacturability than the runner with 17 blades as it has long and highly curved blade with small gaps between the blades, but it comes with 65% more erosion tendency than in the runner with 17 blades.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Technology of Plasticity Conference
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• 2008.05a
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• pp.329-332
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• 2008

Flow imbalance among the cavities was often observed in multi-cavity mold. The flow imbalance affects on the dimensions and physical properties of melded articles. First of all, the origin of flow imbalance is geometrical imbalance of delivery system. However, even the geometry of delivery system is balanced the cavity imbalance is being developed. This comes from the temperature distribution in the cross-section of runner, which is affected by the operational conditions. In this study, experimental study of flow imbalance has been conducted for various injection speeds. This study also suggests new runner design to eliminate flow imbalance in multi-cavity injection mold. Simulation and experimental results showed suggested new designed runner could eliminate or reduce flow imbalance in multi-cavity injection mold.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers A
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• v.39 no.10
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• pp.1021-1028
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• 2015

Subminiature lenses are currently widely used in mobile phone cameras and are usually produced by injection molding. The lens molding process has the unique feature of a runner volume that is much larger than the part volume, and this feature should be considered when determining the mold design and molding conditions. In this study, a shell-type runner was proposed as an alternative to the conventional cylindrical runner used for lens molding. An injection molding simulation was performed by applying the proposed shell runner, and the simulation results were compared with those from the cylindrical runner case. It was found that the shell runner could considerably reduce the runner cooling time with only a slight increase in the injection pressure. The effect of the runner thickness was then investigated numerically in terms of the mold filling and cooling characteristics, from which an optimal runner thickness could be determined.

• International Journal of Fluid Machinery and Systems
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• v.2 no.4
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• pp.392-399
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• 2009

The paper concerns the description of the step by step development process of the new fixed blade runner called "Mixer" suitable for the uprating of the Francis turbines units installed at the older low head hydropower plants. In the paper the details of hydraulic and mechanical design are presented. Since the rotational speed of the new runner is significantly higher then the rotational speed of the original Francis one, the direct coupling of the turbine to the generator can be applied. The maximum efficiency at prescribed operational point was reached by the geometry optimization of two most important components. In the first step the optimization of the draft tube geometry was carried out. The condition for the draft tube geometry optimization was to design the new geometry of the draft tube within the original bad draft tube shape without any extensive civil works. The runner blade geometry optimization was carried out on the runner coupled with the draft tube domain. The blade geometry of the runner was optimized using automatic direct search optimization procedure. The method used for the objective function minimum search is a kind of the Nelder-Mead simplex method. The objective function concerns efficiency, required net head and cavitation features. After successful hydraulic design the modal and stress analysis was carried out on the prototype scale runner. The static pressure distribution from flow simulation was used as a load condition. The modal analysis in air and in water was carried out and the results were compared. The final runner was manufactured in model scale and it is going to be tested in hydraulic laboratory. Since the turbine with the fixed blade runner does not allow double regulation like in case of full Kaplan turbine, it can be profitably used mainly at power plants with smaller changes of operational conditions or in case with more units installed. The advantages are simple manufacturing, installation and therefore lower expenses and short delivery time for turbine uprating.

• International Journal of Fluid Machinery and Systems
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• v.8 no.3
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• pp.183-192
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• 2015

The aim of this study was comparative analysis of sediment-induced erosion on optimized design and traditional design of Francis runner blade. The analysis was conducted through laboratory experiments in a test rig called Rotating Disc Apparatus. The results showed that the extent of erosion was significantly less in the optimized design when compared based on the material loss. It was observed that the optimized design could reduce sediment erosion by about 14.4% if it was used in place of the reference design for entire duration of the experiment. Based on the observations and results obtained, it has been concluded that the optimization of hydraulic design of blade profile of Francis runner can significantly reduce the effect of sediment-induced erosion.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Precision Engineering
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• v.20 no.11
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• pp.41-46
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• 2003

The objective of this paper is to present a methodology for automatically balancing multi-cavity injection molds with the aid of flow simulation. After the runner and cavity layout has been designed, the methodology adjusts runner and gate sizes iteratively based on the outputs of flow analysis. This methodology also ensures that the runner sizes in the final design are machinable. To illustrate this methodology, an example is used wherein a 3-cavity mold is modeled and filling of all the cavities at the same time is achieved. Based on the proposed methodology, a multicavity mold with identical cavities is balanced to minimize overall unfilled volume among various cavities at discrete time steps of the molding cycle. The example indicates that the described methodology can be used effectively to balance runner systems for multi-cavity molds.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Precision Engineering Conference
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• 1997.10a
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• pp.716-719
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• 1997

This paper describes the runner and gate design capabilities of the RAMEDS system, which is a specialized CAD system for injection mold design, dcvcloped using the application procedure interface of the Unigraphics system. In this system, runners lying on sculptuted partlng surface can be modeled by projecting the runner trajectory on the surface and sweeping a selected cross section along the projcctcd trajectory. In addtion, the system provides solid modeling capabilities for three types of gates currently.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Precision Engineering
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• v.33 no.12
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• pp.1021-1030
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• 2016

The runner system of the injection mould and the injection volume of the injection molding process greatly affect the quality of the produced part. The goal of this paper is the design of the runner system and the prediction of the injection volume for the injection moulding of a housing part of small-size air cleaner to improve the formability through the three-dimensional injection moulding analysis. The effects of the runner system of the mould on the injection moulding characteristics are investigated. From the results of the investigation, a proper design of the runner system with uniform filling characteristics and the minimized defect formation is obtained. In addition, the influence of the moving distance of the screw on filling characteristics, weldline formation and deformation characteristics is examined. From the results of the examination, an appropriate moving distance of the screw for the housing part of small-size air cleaner is estimated.