Evaluation of healing models to predict the weld line strength of the amorphous thermoplastic polystyrene by injection molding simulation

In many injection molded parts weld lines are often unavoidable. These cause optical defects and a reduction of the mechanical properties of the part. Therefore, the predictability of the weld line strength at an early stage of development would provide a significant advantage by avoiding costly iterations of the mold and increases the understanding of the correlation between process history of the melt and weld line strength. For this purpose, a calculation routine has been developed to predict the weld line strength based on injection molding simulation. Different models to calculate the healing of a weld line are compared and analyzed. By adding a factor to consider the shear rate in addition to the temperature and the pressure and after calibration to one design of experiment setting of the experimental data, the prediction of the weld line strength shows good agreement for all examined process setpoints of the experimental data for polystyrene.