OPTIMIZATION OF METAL INJECTION MOULDING PROCESS PARAMETERS USING ANOVA METHOD

Identification of significant process parameters during injection moulding of feedstock in Metal Injection Moulding (MIM) is essential because fine control is required for these parameters. The small change in these parameters can cause large variation in the impact energy absorbed of the parts produced by MIM. The controlled parameters used for optimization in this work include injection pressure, injection temperature, injection speed and cooling time. The parameters have been optimized using analysis of variance (ANOVA) for signal to noise ratios. The software used for this analysis is MINITAB 17. The ANOVA also provides the contribution of significant process parameters to impact toughness. Results show that the injection pressure, injection temperature are highly significant factors to the impact toughness, while the injection speed, cooling time, the interaction of injection pressure and injection temperature and interaction of injection speed and injection cooling time do not show significant effect at 95% confidence level.