Feedstock selection or preparation is the first critical consideration of powder injection molding. To ensure the green part quality before the debinding process, the examination of the feedstock properties is vital for injection molding process control. For example, setting proper gate locations is to avoid defects like warpage or cracks caused by unbalanced filling patterns and bad temperature controls, which may further result in uneven distribution of the concentration in green parts. Moldex3D Material Lab provides the rheological properties of feedstock with the low-shear-rate yield stress (shown in Fig. 1) for customers to evaluate the choice of materials in design stage and process control in molding stage. Moldex3D PIM solution can provide the bridge between selecting proper feedstock and optimizing green parts.
Moldex3D PIM module has a similar user-friendly wizard as conventional injection molding (CIM) module. The workflow of the PIM is as intuitive as the injection molding analysis. During the filling stage, users can evaluate both the distributions of feedstock density and powder fraction (shown in Fig. 2 and Fig. 3) to identify potential surface and internal defects of green parts and optimize its quality.
Fig. 1 The shear rate is negatively dependent on the shear viscosity of feed stock 
