Development Of Injection Molding Automation Equipment For Earphone Plug

Many electronic products need to locate and packaging through the injection molding,and the product is variety of types,therefore,the injection molding equipment has a huge marketing potential. However,the update cycle of the electronic injection product is short .If the Injection enterprise wants to keep the outstanding position,they must improve the efficiency of production and the quality of products,and reduce the cost,which can be solved by increasing the automation level of the injection molding.The efficiency of the injection molding production line depends not only on the level of automation of injection molding machine, but also its auxiliary machinery automation level and the level of mold design.At present,the injection auxiliary work almost be done by men,and the auxiliary machinery automation level fall behind the automation of the injection molding machines significantly,which became a bottlenecks to constraint the efficiency of the production line.In this paper,the injection production process of a common headphone plug products was selected as the research object,which the automated production equipment was developed,in order to solve the problem such as low productivity, low yield and high labor intensity,etc.The difficulty lies in the both kind of inserts,which included metal rigid inserts such as copper needle and flexible inserts such as wire rod existing at the same time,and the placement and fixation of the both inserts must be solved in the automated transformation.Through the survey and analysis of the existing earphone plug plastic injection enterprises, an automation production plan is proposed. The development process is divided into two parts: mechanical structure and control system. For the mechanical structure designing part, a multi-functional compound injection mold plan is proposed. The split type mold is designed and the automatic positioning and cable sorting installment is developed. The installment can make automatic production by using the automated compression and cable sorting parts which can take place of manual labor. The actuator uses the compressed air as power source to make accurate position of the mold bar. Finally, the Pro/ENGINEER software is used to build the 3D model and simulate the movement of the mechanical structure.The Control system consists of hardware and software,and is directly controlled by a SCM of STC89C58RD. The design of the hardware involves I/O, serial ports,LED,buttons and so on. The software module of the system has the following functions:reflecting the positions of the mechanism,failure alarming, error code hinting, emergency stop, status resumption and so on.The test run results of the equipment shows that by using this set of automation equipment,the preparation time of the plug mold and carding line reduced to 2s from 7s, and the working style extended from a single work station with duplex operation to double work station with six simultaneous operation, Which can ensure that under the condition that the production yield is no less than 98%, it significantly improved the efficiency of the earphone plug injection up to 216% and at the same time reduced labor intensity, and that it fully meets the design requirements those the manufacturers specified. In addition, this set of equipment also has a series of advantages, compact structure, easy operation, stable operation and low cost. The complex multi-functional compound injection mold machine has a broad application prospects ,for it not only fits the automated injection molding production with high efficiency and quality of plug products with line, but also fits the automated injection molding production of metal inserted parts and soft wires with composite materials.