| dc.description.abstract | In optical industry, injection molding is commonly used for the manufacturing of
plastic optical components. Mold flow analysis (MFA) can help the mold design,
process analysis and parameter setting in injection molding. As the demand on the
quality of optical components is increased, so is the accuracy required in mold
flow analysis. In mold flow analysis, a CAD model must be converted into solid
meshes first. Although semi-automatic mesh generation modules are available in
MFA software, most of the meshes are tetrahedral or BLM types, which are not
accurate enough for the application in optical industry. Therefore, the purpose of
this study is to study the feasibility of applying hybrid meshes to improve the
mold flow analysis for two kinds of optical components, including optical sleeves
and optical lens. For optical sleeves, the primary goal is to study the flow
imbalance on runners. A hybrid mesh combining hexahedral and BLM meshes is
employed to truly model the flow imbalance on the runner, if it exists. The result
is compared with that using pure BLM mesh, demonstrating that the proposed
hybrid mesh is better than BLM mesh. For optical lens, the primary goal is to
model the wave front of the flow during the injecting stage. A mesh generation
method is proposed to generate hybrid meshes for different kinds of optical lens.
To verify the accuracy of the proposed meshing method, three optical sleeves and
three optical lens are individually studied. The short shot of each component is
compared with the result of mold flow analysis, which demonstrates the feasibility
of the proposed meshing method for each case. | en_US |