Instrumentation and In-mould Data Acquisition System for Injection Moulding Process

Developing new tools for industry that lead to a sustainable development is essential. This paper briefly presents the challenges the injection moulding industry faces in manufacturing plastic products and the requirement for moulds to possess specific characteristics to withstand the high pressures and thermal loads imposed on them. Over-sizing moulds to meet these requirements results in elevated production, operation, and logistics costs. To address this challenge, an in-mould monitoring architecture is proposed to measure fundamental mould variables, such as pressure, temperature, vibrations, strain, and displacement. The sensors and the computational architecture required for data acquisition, pre-processing, and storage are described. It also presents a user-friendly front-end architecture example and a user interface (UI) developed using Python. Although preliminary, the results presented here provide evidence of the system’s validity. The monitoring system proposed in this paper, may provide a valuable tool to develop novel models and control strategies for the injection moulding industry that could help to reduce mould oversizing, leading to significant economic and environmental benefits.