Analysis and Design of Mold for Plastic Side Release Buckle Using Moldflow Software

Injection Molding is a crucial segment of the plastics industry mainly due to its ability and flexibility to manufacture intricate components at high production rates and also with easy process flow. Injection molding has laid its hands over right from small parts to big machine parts. Plastic side release buckles, commonly employed in standard bags, suitcases and pouches, and are manufactured exclusively by the injection molding process all around the world. The process involved should be perfect enough to produce parts without defects and low quality. Gate location is one of the important in this process which is necessary for the filling purposes. In view of the significance of a perfect gate location for the plastic injection mold for the side release buckle, this paper focusses on the complete analysis of the buckle using a moldflow software and the determination of optimum gate locations for it. The analysis is complete look into the various quality features important for the mold, it considers identification and improvement of parameters such as fill time, quality, extent of packing and reduced defects and warpage. Utilization of the optimized gate locations for the mold lead to reduced production costs, higher quality and enhanced competitive power of mold enterprises.