Autonomous Monitoring and Quality Control in Cyclic Manufacturing Process

In manufacturing processes, Injection molding is widely used for producing plastic components with a
large lot size, So, continuous improvements in product quality consistency are crucial for maintaining
a competitive edge in the injection molding industry. The occurrence of any disparity affects
productivity for the whole lot. Conventionally, the quality of the molded product is dependent on the
experience and the knowledge of the machine operator, because we cannot control in between the
process. To achieve the optimum quality, the operator tries different settings, as recommended by the
manufacturer. Various offline optimization techniques like ANN, GA, Iterative method, and simulations
are being in use for optimization of the injection molding process. But still, due to variation during the
molding cycles, quality failures occur. The modern injection molding machines can reciprocate the
data for operating process parameters, and external monitoring methodologies can also be applied to
the machine. The presented work focuses on the smart technology development for the real-time
monitoring and control of the injection molding process. To make the molding process smart. The
cavity sensors including pressure and temperature sensors are used to monitor the process inside the
mold. Smart monitoring consists of data generation, acquisition, processing, analysis, and failure
detection. Later an AI-based autonomous control strategy is figured out to compensate for the
variation of the molding condition in the mold cavity so that the quality consistency is always satisfied.
Process parameters and their interrelationship with quality defects have been studied and used to
derive the control strategy. The entire process is supposed to be smart and autonomous after its
implementation. Real industry scenarios and processing data have been used to validate the
developed system for an automotive product. The research object chosen for this study is an
automotive product i.e. card door trim. A comparative study shows that it will successfully reduce the
number of scrap parts by 20%. This work is done with the mindset of getting the products
continuously with the highest quality and it will surely help molding and automotive industry in many
ways.