Surrogate Modelling for Injection Molding Processes using Machine Learning
This work addresses the problem of slow design cycles for engineers in manufacturing, but it is incremental as it builds on existing surrogate modeling techniques with specific feature engineering.
The authors tackled the need for faster simulation in injection molding by developing a machine learning-based surrogate model that predicts fill time and deflection distributions, achieving speedups of approximately 17 times faster for mean and 14 times for median total times compared to traditional Moldflow software.
Injection molding is one of the most popular manufacturing methods for the modeling of complex plastic objects. Faster numerical simulation of the technological process would allow for faster and cheaper design cycles of new products. In this work, we propose a baseline for a data processing pipeline that includes the extraction of data from Moldflow simulation projects and the prediction of the fill time and deflection distributions over 3-dimensional surfaces using machine learning models. We propose algorithms for engineering of features, including information of injector gates parameters that will mostly affect the time for plastic to reach the particular point of the form for fill time prediction, and geometrical features for deflection prediction. We propose and evaluate baseline machine learning models for fill time and deflection distribution prediction and provide baseline values of MSE and RMSE metrics. Finally, we measure the execution time of our solution and show that it significantly exceeds the time of simulation with Moldflow software: approximately 17 times and 14 times faster for mean and median total times respectively, comparing the times of all analysis stages for deflection prediction. Our solution has been implemented in a prototype web application that was approved by the management board of Fiat Chrysler Automobiles and Illogic SRL. As one of the promising applications of this surrogate modelling approach, we envision the use of trained models as a fast objective function in the task of optimization of technological parameters of the injection molding process (meaning optimal placement of gates), which could significantly aid engineers in this task, or even automate it.