Injection Molding Structures

Research abstract

The state of the art in small molded structures is the digital versatile disk (DVD) that is used for movies, etc. DVDs are injection molded from a special grade of polycarbonate and a specific nickel tooling with near-nanoscale features. The molding cycle time is 2 s. The molder, however, does not need to completely replicate the "pits" containing the binary (0,1) information that produces the movie when the disk is read using a laser. In last few years, Joey Mead and I
have been examining the effects of new tooling and other polymers when molding nanoscale features and are currently looking at patterning surfaces of molded parts. We have been using silicon tooling produced at Northeastern University for this work - note that injection molds are usually steel - and have found that surface properties significantly impact the quality of the molded parts.

Research activities/experience

Your research is an extension of this molding work. It will involve 1) injection molding structures, 2) measuring these structures using atomic force microscopy and scanning electron microscopy, and 3) characterizing the tooling surfaces and polymers. I will email you introductory reading material on injection molding, characterization, and our previous work this weekend.

You, however, will be working with a large research group that includes experienced nanomolding experts (Sung-hwan Yoon, Chinnawat "Chin" Srirojpinyo, and Michael Alabran), characterization
experts (Dr. Jun Lee and Rina Ordonez), and the all-around experts (Bhavjit Ghumman, Zhenghong Tao, Ming Wei, Dr. Myunghwan Kim, and Dr. Sandip Sengupta). These students and post-doctoral researchers will be available to assist you. In addition, several UML undergraduate
students and two students from City College of New York will also be performing research this summer.

You will be working on U Mass Lowell's North Campus, primarily in the basements of Ball and Olney Halls. If you have not been to U Mass Lowell before, you are welcome to visit before the start of the program.

Suggested literature to be reviewed by RET/YSP prior to beginning this research assignment

Basic Injection Molding (MS Word)

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