The Development of Gas Assist Injection Molding Technology for Instrument Panel Carrier

Gas Assist Injection Molding technology is becoming a popular new or alternative method for producing various types of automotive plastic components. Qualitatively, the benefits of Gas Assist Injection Molding have been thoroughly researched and made known to the public. But, quantitatively, there are only a few applications known to the automotive industry. For our research, we constructed a Gas Assist Injection Molding set of tooling that was based on the design of a production instrument panel carrier. We compared the Gas Assist Injection Molding component and normal instrument panel carrier with the intent to observe or define the following benefits:

1. 1.
   Reduction of part weight.
2. 2.
   Enhance the material flow in the mold.
3. 3.
   Reduce the required press clamp tonnage vs injection molding.
4. 4.
   Simplification of the mold tooling.
5. 5.
   Define the optimum mold conditions for selected candidates of plastic resin to be evaluated in the trials of the instrument panel.