Screw design in injection molding

The performance of screws of advanced design in injection molding has been investigated with respect to four different objectives: (1) improvement of distributive mixing; (2) improvement of dispersive mixing; (3) increase of plasticating capacity; and (4) reduction of inhomogeneity of melt temperature. The screws used are three zone screws with different compression ratios, screws with pineapple or Maddock/Egan mixing elements, with one or two channel barrier sections, with static mixers mounted in the valve or in the nozzle, or with combinations of these different elements. The best mixing quality is obtained with multi-channel Maddock sections. The highest plasticating capacity and, consequently, the shortest cycle times are achieved with the barrier screws. Temperature measurements show that these screws improve melt homogeneity considerably with a relatively small loss of plasticating time. In all cases, increasing the back pressure gives inferior results compared with improvement of the screw design.