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Plastic Part Failure Analysis
Fee: $1,095
Instructor: Mike Sepe
Who Should Attend:
Product designers, molders, and mold designers can benefit from this two-day seminar. Engineering and training managers can also benefit from a better appreciation of the characteristics of plastic part quality and performance. Buyers can gain an understanding of the importance of designer and quality specifications.
Course Outline:
- Elements of a successful plastic product
- Part design
- Mold design
- Material selection
- Processing
- Principles of plastic part design
- Nominal walls
- Ribs and other projections
- Holes and other depressions
- Designing for manufacturing and assembly (DFMA)
- Design properties versus inherent properties of materials
- Mold design considerations
- Mold steel selection
- Managing polymer flow in the mold - runners and gates
- Cavitation and the effect on balanced flow
- The economics of cavitation
- Hot runners versus conventional cold runners
- Mold temperature control
- Draft angles and ejection
- Material selection
- Defining the application environment - time, temperature, stresses, etc.
- Amorphous and semi-crystalline polymers
- The importance of molecular weight
- Structural choices within a polymer family
- Property modifiers and additives
- Regulatory considerations - UL, NSF, FDA
- Performance and processability
- Establishing the cost/performance balance
- Processing
- The fundamentals of polymer flow
- The effect of material structure on sound processing decisions
- Machine selection
- Process control strategies
- The quest for Six Sigma
- Failure analysis tools
- Material testing - composition and degradation
- Molecular weight evaluations
- Thermal analysis - DSC, TGA, DMA, TMA
- Spectroscopy - FTIR, EDS, XPS, SIMS
- Microscopy - cross sections and scanning electron microscopy
- Physical property evaluation - your part is not a tensile bar
- FEA and its relation to the application environment
- Advanced characterization of mechanical properties
- Material testing - composition and degradation
- The failure analysis process
- Gathering background information
- Focusing on the four fundamentals of a successful product
- Conducting the appropriate evaluations
- Establishing root cause
- Fixing what is broken
- Understanding the interactions of multiple causes
- The role of designs of experiment
- The cost/benefit analysis of problem solving
- Following up
- Case studies