MOLDING PARAMETERS DESIGN FOR MESO AND MICRO COMPONENTS USING POLYLACTIC ACID (PLA)

Currently, the increasing interest in the study of Polylactic acid (PLA) polymer has been motivated by the potential of such material for consumer and biomedical applications. PLA is a thermoplastic polymer, biodegradable, compostable and deriving from renewable natural sources as starch and sugar. Injection molding is the most widely used process for thermoplastic micro-featured parts for to its capacity to manufacture low-cost and high repeatable micro-parts. The use of PLA for injection molded micro components is still not well stabilized due to the slow crystallization kinetics, not suitable for high performance applications. In this work, preliminary experimental studies have been performed to analyze the filling ability of PLA in a meso and a micro parts using different molding conditions to evaluate process parameters influence. The experiments results are discussed in the paper and show that injection molding proved to be suitable for meso-micro PLA product manufacturing.