Research On Concurrent Engineeringwith Its Application InInjection Mold Making

With the increase of market competition, products should been upgraded quickly and much more new products are brought to the market. For higher competitive ability, it’s necessary to shorten starting time, decrease cost and improve quality of new products. As a crucial process of making products, mold manufacture have to be finished in a shorter time period with better quality and less cost..The new concept of Concurrent Engineering (CE) is a way of manufacturing products collaboratively, which means fully consider molding, manufacturing and other related factors of plastic items in every single molding stage. By apply such a method, success rate of the fist mold test and mold quality can be both improved. Then manufacture cost can be decreased greatly and development cycle can be shortened.This study will combine the actual condition of mold designing and producing, and study how to apply the Concurrent Engineering (CE) in related enterprises’daily manufacturing. This study combines following works:By graph theory and matrix method, the coupling and classification of injection mold manufacturing activities and their relationship in the process are analyzed. The process model of the concurrent mold manufacturing is reconfigured in terms of the feature and process in the injection mold making.On the bases of researching relationships of activities between different stages during the whole process of mold producing, key technologies such as the flowchart of the concurrent mold manufacturing, the interposing points, engineering decision and change points, serial changing points, and the integrated mold making team are discussed. The process of the mold manufacturing will be turned into a process of concurrence and serialization by doing such a research.This paper focused on the effects of vital technologies such as CAD/CAE/CAM, DFM and PDM during the concurrent mold producing process manufacturing environment. And how to realize these vital technologies are discussed in this study.Standing on the current research of CE theory, the mold of a joint holder is taken as an example to help intensive research and system development the research. With the concurrent manufacturing, the mold tested successfully by one time. Compared with the original serial mode, the manufacturing cycle is shortened significantly, which further shows it is necessary to implement the concurrent engineering in the enterprise.