BACK INJECTION MOLDING WITH ADDITIVE MANUFACTURED MOLD INSERTS USING ALL INKJET PRINTED SUBSTRATES
Back injection molding is a well known process in the plastics industry. For example, the fabrication of decorated interior parts in the automotive industry is one of many fields of application. In the last few years, the additive manufacturing process rapidly expanded in injection molding. For instance, it is used for producing injection mold inserts made of metal or plastic. This technique is called Rapid Tooling. The aim of this paper is to investigate the back injection molding process with additive manufactured mold inserts made of Fullcure RGD 720 and to verify if this technique is feasible. Therefore, a substrate with all inkjet printed conductor traces was placed in the mold insert. The injection molding was done with a standard injection molding machine. The conductive traces were printed with a standard inkjet printer manufactured by Epson. To generate additional information about the additive manufacturing material Fullcure RGD 720 a differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) was done.