Overall Control System for Injection Molding Process

A multi-layer injection molding machine control system is proposed in this paper. The first layer, an advanced process parameter control layer, provides accurate and robust control of key process variables. The second layer consists of two modules, a profile setting layer determining the shapes of set-point profiles for the key process variables, to achieve an evenly distributed part quality along the flow directions; and a process fault detection and diagnoses system monitoring the operation of injection molding process. The third layer, a quality control layer, consists of a quantitative quality prediction model and a quality controller. This final layer provides a mechanism for closed-loop control of certain part quality. The related work that has been conducted on these three layers is discussed extensively in this paper, and the future work is introduced as well