Abstract: The numerical simulation of injection mold filling process is combined with the design optimization method to find the optimal gate location. The objective function is expressed in terms of the difference of the maximum and minimum times of boundary filling. The coordinates of the gate location are chosen as design variables, and the constraint is to limit the clamp force lower than the reference value. The design sensitivities are evaluated via the finite difference approximation, and optimization problem is solved with the sequential linear programming algorithm. The injection gate is modeled as point source to simplify the filling simulation and the gate location is defined as continuous function of the design variables to facilitate the gradient based optimization algorithms. Finally, numerical examples are given to demonstrate the effect of proposed method.

Key words: Optimization, Gate, Injection molding