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Evaluation of service life of silicone rubber molds using vacuum casting

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Abstract

Shortening the time-to-market is an important issue in the manufacturing industry. Indirect tooling technology was regarded as a promising approach of reducing time and cost to the market in a new product development phase. Silicone rubber mold was frequently employed in the indirect tooling. In this study, the service life of silicone rubber molds was investigated using both wax injection molding and vacuum casting. The experimental results revealed that the average roughness of the inner surface of silicone rubber mold were increased with increasing the number of test runs and saturated after 25 test runs. The degassing time needs to be increased with increasing the number of test runs in the vacuum casting process. The criteria for judging the service life of silicone rubber molds include surface quality of the parts fabricated, whitening regions in the inner wall surfaces of silicone rubber molds, and the overall elasticity of silicone rubber molds.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Mechanical Engineering, Ming Chi University of Technology, No. 84, Gungjuan Road, New Taipei City, 243, Taiwan

    Chil-Chyuan Kuo & Min-Xiang Wu

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  1. Chil-Chyuan Kuo
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  2. Min-Xiang Wu
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Correspondence to Chil-Chyuan Kuo.

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Kuo, CC., Wu, MX. Evaluation of service life of silicone rubber molds using vacuum casting. Int J Adv Manuf Technol 90, 3775–3781 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00170-016-9755-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00170-016-9755-1

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