Application of FEA Simulations in Plastic Injection Molding Tooling Failure Analysis

Plastics injection molds are typically subjected to a combination of loadings such as injection pressure, temperature changes, clamping force, and potential interference at seal-off surfaces during manufacturing process. The loadings on the molds are as cyclic as the injection molding cycles. As a result, the molds could fail either in material overstraining or fatigue. In this paper, several failure cases will be presented, along with the FEA stress and fatigue analysis results, to demonstrate the effect of the above mentioned loadings on the mold structural integrity. This paper will also show how the FEA stress and fatigue analyses were effectively employed to determine the mold failure root cause and assist the design modification in a usually constrained time frame.