Morphological characterization of injection molded parts in Ren Shape 5166 polyurethane inserts for rapid tooling

Abstract

The Rapid Tooling techniques have been emerging to produce rapid moulds for injecting plas-tics parts. Among the current solutions, material removal by milling machining of polymeric resin or poly-meric composites is an attractive alternative for manufacturing moulds for injecting short series of products. This work assesses the morphology of parts injected in mould cavities manufactured by a polyurethane resin (PUR) Ren Shape 5166, as an alternative for Rapid Tooling, and the parts injected in cavities manufactured by the ordinary mould steel. Both cavities were used for injecting the parts with polypropylene. The speci-mens were characterized by Optical Microscopy and Differential Scanning Calorimetry, to observe the mor-phology and the resulting degree of crystallization from the moulding process. The results show the differ-ences in the microstructure structure from the parts injected in both cavities. It was observed that the parts injected in the PUR cavities are slightly more crystalline and display morphology different than the parts in-jected in the mould steel.