Wednesday, September 4, 2013

ProtoLabs Design Tips

Here are pdfs for 9 volumes of ProtoLabs Design tips. They do low volume injection molding and rapid three-axis CNC machining.

Volume 1 — Topics include: draft, radiused corners, material choices, shut-offs, texture...

Volume 2 — Topics include: side actions, naming files, text on parts, wall thickness...

Volume 3 — Topics include: hot tips on gates, parting lines, clips, shut-offs, materials matrix...

Volume 4 — Topics include: fun with cams, fillets, living hinges, ultrasonic welds, sink...

Volume 5 — Topics include: rotational draft, knit lines, square corners, prototyping...

Volume 6 — Topics include: bosses, prototyping processes, attachments, mold flow...

Volume 7 — Topics include: texture, pickouts, bump-offs, ejector pins, parting lines...

Volume 8 — Topics include: gates, living hinges, designing lenses, finishes, transparent parts, and more...

Volume 9 — Topics include: designing clips, elimination of unnecessary material, text, crush ribs, bridge tooling, injection molding gears…

1 comment:

  1. Here's an interesting example of topology optimization with additional constraints to ensure injection mold-ability (by way of topology-opt.com): In many cases the topology optimization method yield inadmissible solutions in respect to a particular manufacturing process, e.g. injection molding. In the present work it is chosen to focus on the most common injection molding parameters/factors determining the quality of the mold geometry, i.e. uniform thickness, filling of the die and ejection of the molded item, i.e. extrusion. The mentioned injection mold parameters/factors are introduced in the topology optimization by defining a centerline of the initial domain and then penalize elements in respect to the distance to the defined centerline of the domain.
    Implementation of molding constraints in topology optimization

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