An on-line measurement scheme of melt-front-area during injection filling via a soft-sensor implementation

A constant melt-front velocity during the filling of an injection mold cavity is commonly believed to bring about more uniform part quality. To maintain a constant melt-front velocity, injection velocity can be set proportional to the melt-front-area which is, however, not directly measurable. An on-line soft-sensor scheme is developed through neural network to correlate on-line measurable process variables to the melt-front-area. Simulations indicate that the soft-sensor developed for the melt-front-area works reasonably well for some selected molds.