Towards an online portal for designers and manufacturers of plastics
Towards an online portal for designers and manufacturers of plastics
Injection moulding is a complex process in which many guidelines need to be followed to ensure that the initial product design is also manufacturable. Today, manufacturability checks on product designs are mostly done manually on the part of injection moulders (or production departments in larger companies). These checks take time and require the presence of experienced personnel. Moreover, capabilities vary from one injection moulder to another, or even from one machine to another, and the current back-and-forth between designers and injection moulders creates long lead times. Both injection moulders and designers can benefit from an online portal that automates the initial manufacturability checks of designs.
Existing portals such as Fictiv and Protolabs contain some drawbacks:
- Manufacturability checks of the design still require manual review by injection moulders;
- For designers, it is not transparent which injection moulders, anywhere in the world, their design ends up with;
- (Visual) feedback on manufacturability is not integrated into the design file.
In addition, while both designers and injection moulders have sufficient knowledge about the most commonly used plastics, there is often insufficient knowledge about the plastics for specific applications. Designing and linking manufacturability and material selection remains a challenge, and is not made easier by the emergence of recycled materials and their inherent variability.
Development of an online portal by Centexbel and Flanders Make
Together with Centexbel, we have started development for an online portal for injection moulding. This prototype will allow users to:
- Make a thoughtful choice of materials;
- Analyse designs for manufacturability;
- Prepare designs for quotation.
As an injection moulder, you will be able to:
- Incorporate the portal on your own website;
- Input your own manufacturability rules based on your own process knowledge and machinery;
- Get informed guidance when selecting lesser-known or recycled plastics;
- Speed up your quotation process by:
- Giving design feedback to designers faster;
- Receiving designs that are manufacturable on your own machines;
- Instantly seeing which machines are suitable for making a design;
- Getting starting values to prepare quotes.
As a designer, you will:
- Match your designs to manufacturability and cost with one or more injection moulders and/or machines;
- Gain informed guidance when selecting lesser-known or recycled plastics;
- Speed up your quoting process by:
- Getting design feedback from injection moulders faster;
- Incorporating design feedback into your design faster.
As a software provider, you will be able to further refine the portal and make it more user-friendly by:
- Elaborating further to allow injection moulders and design companies to work together;
- Further elaborating it for an injection moulding company's specific requirements and linking it to their quotation software.
Join this project now!
To further develop our portal, we are currently still looking for companies willing to participate in the project. This way, you can co-direct the research and our researchers will assist you with advice, further exploration, R&D to support the integration of this portal.
How can you participate?
We want to ensure that as many companies as possible can benefit from our research. After all, our mission is to further embed and strengthen industry in Flanders.
As part of this project, we are therefore always looking for companies that see a function for this portal in their business operations or even want to be part of the research group. We are thinking here of design agencies, injection moulders, mould builders, software providers, etc.
The great advantage of participating in the research is that you can give direction to the research yourself. There are also other ways to collaborate within this framework, from completely free of charge to specific in-depth research, in the context of material selection, design evaluation, production guidelines and web portals. We offer:
- Participation in the user group of the OPKOP research project;
- Advice;
- Knowledge transfer;
- Preliminary studies;
- In-depth research;
- Integration of the developed technology into systems or processes.
In any case, we offer your company all the necessary support and information. This ranges from advice, further exploration, R&D to support in the integration of this online portal.
