Modulbeschreibung

The educational objective in deisgn of plastic parts is to provide students with the knowledge, skills and principles necessary to design effectively and innovatively with plastics materials. 

Students should understand the mechanical behaviour of plastics in order to ensure that the designed injection moulded components meet the requirements for strength, stiffness and load capacity. The training also teaches aspects of mould technology so that the students can optimise the designs taking into account the manufacturing processes. Design, manufacturing and also material-related errors repeatedly lead to the failure of components. The procedure for finding the cause is also an important training objective of this module.

Professional skills; the participants:

• know the material mechanical behaviour of plastics
• understands and can apply the design principles for plastic components and the effects on the corresponding mould
• are able to analyse their part designs according to manufacturability and stress accumulations  
• can carry out thermal and rheological process designs on the basis of simulation programs
• learn from cases of failure and can apply the systematic approach to new cases 

Personal skills; the participants:

• learn self-reflection and self-assessment skills;
• identify, by reflecting on their work during the exercises, in which areas they have made progress and in which areas there is still room for improvement.  
• acquire self-confidence in their abilities to be able to act confidently and decisively in future construction projects. 

Social skills; the participants:

• learn during the exercises to communicate their opinion clearly and understandably and also to listen and be willing to accept feedback from the other team member
• can actively participate in professional discussions on the basis of the acquired professional knowledge and represent their own opinion.

Explanation of the design of an injection mould and its influence on the component properties (parting line, position of cavities, sprue selection, rheological design).

• Failure analysis of plastic components: Procedure; design and processing defects
• Presentation of special plastics testing methods TGA/DSC/FT-IR
• Design of typical plastic components: snap fit, press connection, film joint, ...
• Material mechanics of plastics:  
    o Introduction, structure and composition of polymers, stress sensitivity, quantification of deformation behaviour.
    o Impact behaviour of thermoplastics, short-term behaviour and failure modes of thermoplastics
    o Dynamic-cyclic behaviour of plastics, strength condition for dimensioning
    o Approaches to the calculation of the material behaviour

Lecture and practical course materials