Mold-Based Production Systems

Mold-based production systems are vastly common in mass production processes, due to the high investment costs of production equipment. In order to address the challenge of a strong tendency towards individualized customer demands, companies in high-wage countries are forced to react towards these changes. This chapter describes recent advances in the field of individualized production for mold-based production systems regarding plastics profile extrusion and high-pressure die casting. A holistic methodology for an integrated product and mold design is presented based on the principles of simultaneous engineering. In addition, recent advances in the field of numerical optimization are shown. The advances in numerical optimization will be carried out based on the processes mentioned above. The monitoring and simulation of the viscoelastic swell will be shown for plastics profile extrusion. For the field of high-pressure die casting the strategy to optimize the entire process will be outlined and current experimental results shown. For both application cases the potential benefit of additive manufacturing technologies—such as Selective Laser Melting (SLM)—will be evaluated and validated inasmuch as possible.