Moldflow, as an injection molding simulation software, plays a vital role in the early development and manufacturing of connectors. Moldflow simulations can predict plastic flow behavior before manufacturing, optimizing connector structure and wall thickness to reduce potential defects such as short shots, warpage, and porosity. These optimizations help improve connector quality and reliability, ensuring performance in real-world applications.
Specifically, benefits of Moldflow for connectors include:
Optimizing Product Design: Moldflow allows you to compare different design options in terms of flow front state, pressure distribution, temperature distribution, and deformation, allowing you to intuitively select optimal design. Furthermore, this technology enables in-depth analysis of product sink mark risks, enabling you to predict and optimize product structure in advance, thus avoiding quality issues during subsequent manufacturing.
Shortening Development Cycles: Traditional connector development often requires multiple mold trials and re-molds to resolve issues. Using Moldflow for simulation analysis can predict and optimize potential issues before mold creation, even during product design phase, effectively reducing number of mold trials and modifications, shortening product development cycle.
Improving Production Efficiency: By optimizing injection molding process parameters such as temperature, pressure, cooling time, and deformation using Moldflow, production efficiency can be improved and costs can be reduced. Moldflow also helps analyze product performance under various conditions, ensuring stability and reliability of connector in actual applications.
Following example illustrates this using a DDR connector product:
1. Product Issue
Due to insufficient understanding of simulation in the early stages of design, mold creation was conducted without sufficient analysis and verification, resulting in product deformation, as shown in figure below.

 

2. Cause Analysis
A comprehensive analysis of product deformation, encompassing everything from mold structure to product structure, from gate location to water channel layout, and from production equipment to process, initially determined that deformation was related to product's flow pattern, which in turn is related to product structure. Flow pattern exhibited a typical pointed-beak flow pattern, with faster flow on one side and slower flow on the other. Flow pattern is shown in figure below.

 

3. Product Structure
Product is characterized by numerous castle structures, resulting in uneven wall thickness distribution. Uneven wall thickness leads to uneven flow, resulting in severe lateral flow and aforementioned cusp-like flow. A typical castle structure is shown in figure below.

 

4. Optimization Measures
From above analysis, cusp-like flow is caused by product structure. Next, we will modify wall thickness distribution of product. Locally adding glue to slow-flowing areas at the bottom acts as a diversion mechanism. Characteristic of plastic flow is that thicker areas flow faster, while thinner areas flow slower. Specifically, wall thickness is increased from 0.35mm to 0.80mm. This is shown in figure below.

 

5. Improvement Results
5.1 Flow Analysis
Simulation results show that flow has been significantly improved, with flow front at cusp becoming flatter.

 

5.2 Deformation
Target deformation value for product was to keep it within 0.1mm after reflow. Before improvement, deformation far exceeded the 0.1mm requirement. After flow improvement, deformation after reflow process was within 0.1mm requirement, and twisting deformation indicated by red arrow was also completely eliminated. Deformation improvement is shown in figure below.

 

Above example demonstrates that proper application of Moldflow in connector products can optimize product deformation, improve production stability, increase product yield, shorten product development cycles, and reduce production costs. Furthermore, Moldflow can help optimize product structure, gate location, and cooling channel layout; select appropriate runner, gate, cooling channel dimensions; and select appropriate materials.
In short, Moldflow plays an increasingly important role in simulating and analyzing injection molding process, predicting potential product problems, and optimizing design, molds, and processes, ultimately improving product quality and production efficiency.