Material Insights by Test Type

Thermal

Mold Tempering: Conformal Cooling - yes or no?

The tempering layout for injection molds is often designed departing from previous experiences. The manufacturing feasibility is the main driver when deciding where to place cooling lines. However, often the relevance of the tempering in the process profitability or in the part quality is underestimated, and due to the lack of better information sometimes the resulting tempering performs far from the optimum. As a consequence, the molding efficiency is reduced, the part quality is compromised and, once the mold is already built, sometimes expensive trial-and-error is required to bring the mold to an optimum configuration.

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Handbook of Plastics Analysis: Book Review

Assurance of quality in raw materials, control over production, and a basic understanding of criteria for performance all require a sure and complete knowledge of analytical methods for plastics. The present volume organizes the vast world of plastics analysis into a relatively compact form. A plastics engineer will find familiar territory in such subjects as rheometry, differential scanning calorimetry, and measurement of thermal properties. Polymer physicists and chemists will be at home with spectroscopic analyses, liquid chromatography, and nuclear magnetic resonance. All these topics and many more are covered in twelve chapters written by an impressive array of experts drawn from industry and academia.

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