YULON Nissan was founded on October 22, 2003 in Taiwan. Since then, YULON has been receiving awards for its excellent performance and services. For example, ISO 9001 and ISO 14001 certification in November, 2004. YULON Nissan believes in cooperating car and people into people’s daily life. (Source: www.nissan.com.tw)
The Challenge
Problems on washable luggage board design. The board is required to be strong enough to load passengers or cargoes, the board weight must be light enough to facilitate getting the spare tire under, and the board has to be flat from an esthetic point of view.
The Solution
Proved to precisely predict the unbalanced thickness that affects the deformation and able to control the structure strength under the safety and satisfaction.
Key Benefits
Change to a better layout and thickness distribution. Only a single plastic material is applied but the product remains the same mechanical strength and flatness. Simplify manufacturing process and reduce costs and the product weight.
Moldex3D is very user-friendly. The Icon list is very clear and well-organized, which makes the software easy to operate. Most importantly, the results are good enough to reduce our cycle time and save costs.
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Fig. 1 Luggage board 1 |
Fig. 2 Luggage board 2 |
In early 2005, YULON Nissan and Moldex3D worked together again on an important LSUV (luxury sport utility vehicles) development and testing. The top LSUV is to pinpoint the top class consumers; therefore, the perfect quality is necessary in each manufacturing cycle. The washable luggage board is a special case here, for it requires good structure strength, since a poor one will usually cause deformations.
During the development stage of a product, the mechanical strength is an important issue even above product appearance and functions. But especially for the injection molding product, mold property is another influential factor. When changing the product layout and thickness distribution, the strength and the properties of mold change accordingly. Therefore, it is insufficient if one only considers one of these factors mentioned above.
Digging out the defects in molding using injection molding simulation and assess various functional aspects of product utilizing other CAE software, by doing so one can be assured that the product quality is depending on a good design.
Problems on washable luggage board design. This case is the luggage board inside a vehicle, which has to satisfy the following points: the board is required to be strong enough to load passengers or cargoes, the board weight must be light enough to facilitate getting the spare tire under, and the board has to be flat from an esthetic point of view (Fig. 1~2). The luggage board combines metal and plastic in the previous design. The metal part can overcome the problem of warpage and strength but will take too much time and cost during production. Besides, the heavy weight also increases the oil expense.
Moldex3D helps strengthening the board
In the revised design, we change to a better layout and thickness distribution. Only a single plastic material is applied but the product remains the same mechanical strength and flatness. This can simplify manufacturing process, reduce costs and the product weight. By the assistance of Moldex3D, we can find the optimum product design in injection molding, and then assess the strength by structural analysis (Fig. 3~6).
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Fig. 3 Runner layout |
Fig. 4 Melt front 50% |
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Fig. 5 Melt front 90% |
Fig. 6 Warpage/Z-displacement |
Moldex3D’s success with automobile industry
On the washable luggage board case, Moldex3D participated in the early design cycle and played an important role to provide suggestions and guided the direction. Moldex3D is proved to precisely predict the unbalanced thickness that affects the deformation and able to control the structure strength under the safety and satisfaction. YULON engineer, Mr. Lin Hua-Long, is one of the key cooperation persons: “Moldex3D is very user-friendly. The Icon list is very clear and well-organized, which makes the software easy to operate. Most importantly, the results are good enough to reduce our cycle time and save costs,” he approved.
* This case was published in December, 2005. Moldex3D News No. 13