The Plastic Injection Moulding Process

Preparing the Mould

Feeding the polymer resin (pellets) down to the auger (screw) is a large open-bottomed container. An electric (or hydraulic) motor is responsible for turning the auger inside a heated cylinder which feeds the pellets up through the grooves of the auger. A gate before the mould cavity restricts the flow of the melt into the mould and limits backflow. The pressure created by pushing the forward through the grooves up to the gate also produces heat on the inside of the cylinder which helps to melt the polymer and prepare it for injection into the mould.

Injection of Polymer Melt Into the Mould

As the auger moves forward it injects polymer melt into the mould at high pressure (typically 10,000 - 30,000 psi), holds it, and adds more melt to ensure the contraction due to cooling and solidification does not leave gaps in the final product. Eventually the gate solidifies and isolates the mould from the injection cylinder.

Cooling the Mould

Moulds are typically air or water cooled. Sometimes small holes are bored into the mould that allow a cooling liquid (such as water) to be circulated. Injection mould cooling consumes about 85% of the cycle time for the entire process.

Unloading / Demoulding

After solidification, the clamp holding the two halves of the mould together closed is opened allowing the part to be removed. The injection moulding process can then be repeated.

Injection Molding - How Plastic is Molded

Written by: Linda Moore

Plastic has, quite literally, become the cornerstone of our society. We make so many things from plastic that it is hard to imagine what our lives would be like if it was never invented. With so many of our everyday products being made of plastic, it is easy to understand why plastic injection molding is such a huge industry.

Approximately 30% of all plastic products are produced using an injection molding process. Of this 30%, a large amount of these products are produced by using custom injection molding technology. Six steps are involved in the injection molding process, after the prototype has been made and approved.

The first step to the injection molding process is the clamping of the mold. This clamping unit is one of three standard parts of the injection machine. They are the mold, the clamping unit and the injection unit. The clamp is what actually holds the mold while the melted plastic is being injected, the mold is held under pressure while the injected plastic is cooling.

Next is the actual injection of the melted plastic. The plastic usually begins this process as pellets that are put into a large hopper. The pellets are then fed to a cylinder; here they are heated until they become molten plastic that is easily forced into the mold. The plastic stays in the mold, where it is being clamped under pressure until it cools.

The next couple of steps consist of the dwelling phase, which is basically making sure that all of the cavities of the mold are filled with the melted plastic. After the dwelling phase, the cooling process begins and continues until the plastic becomes solid inside the form. Finally, the mold is opened and the newly formed plastic part is ejected from its mold. The part is cleaned of any extra plastic from the mold.

As with any process, there are advantages and disadvantages associated with plastic injection molding. The advantages outweigh the disadvantages for most companies; they include being able to keep up high levels of production, being able to replicate a high tolerance level in the products being produced, and lower costs for labor as the bulk of the work is done by machine. Plastic injection molding also has the added benefit of lower scrap costs because the mold is so precisely made.

However, the disadvantages can be a deal breaker for smaller companies that would like to utilize plastic injection molding as a way to produce parts. These disadvantages are, that they equipment needed is expensive, therefore, increasing operating costs.

Thankfully, for these smaller companies, there are businesses that specialize in custom plastic injection molding. They will make a mock up mold to the exact specifications, run it through the complete process and present the completed piece along with an estimate to complete the job to the customer.

Article Source: http://www.dailynewarticles.com

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Linda Moore writes on a variety of subjects including home ownership, travel, personal enrichment, plastic injection molding and replacement auto glass.

PC Hit 'Minecraft' Comes to Android

Unless you've been living in a cave, you've probably heard of Minecraft, Notch's addictive first-person adventure/construction game that's something like computer Legos. It's an indie sensation for Windows and Linux PCs, as well as Macs, and the videos of people building everything from the Taj Mahal to the Starship Enterprise are all over YouTube.

Well, now it's coming to a portable game console made by Sony! But it isn't the PlayStation Portable, or even the upcoming Vita. No, it's the Sony Ericsson Xperia Play, the fabled "PlayStation Phone." And while it's on the Android Market right now, according to Droid Gamers, it'll be an Xperia Play exclusive for a little while.

Why the Xperia Play, and not the PlayStation Portable or Nintendo DS?

Well, first off Minecraft is a game that kinda requires a touch screen, or at least a point-and-click interface. So that basically rules the PSP out. And Nintendo requires a huge up-front investment to write games for even the DSiWare catalog, plus the original DS probably isn't powerful enough to handle a demanding game like Minecraft.

"Minecraft 3D" would be fun, but the Nintendo 3DS isn't selling too well, and for the first time Nintendo's future in handheld gaming just may be in question. So that basically rules out all of today's handheld game consoles.

OK, so why not the iPhone and iPod Touch then?

Minecraft is, in fact, coming to iOS, according to Duncan Geere of Wired Magazine. But I can think of two reasons why it might've come to Android first.

One, Minecraft is written in Java. Android primarily uses Java for game development. It's possible that Notch may have had to port it to C or C++ for performance reasons, which would negate this argument, but it's worth mentioning either way.

And two, unlike the iPhone the Android world has a smartphone with hardware controls: The aforementioned Xperia Play. More than that, it's not just a PSP Go style smartphone, it's the first PlayStation Certified phone, a designation implying that there will be more of them. By putting in extra work now, Notch ensures compatibility with future PlayStation phones, and maybe preferred placement for Minecraft on them.

The upshot

If the Vita somehow adds support for PlayStation phone games -- a move that would be awesome, but hasn't been mentioned or hinted at yet -- we just might see Minecraft on other Sony consoles as well. Until then, PlayStation phone owners have another cool title to play with, that they can get on the Android Market right now. And Android and iPhone users have something big to look forward to.

US says Legionnaires cases triple over decade

ATLANTA (AP) — Cases of Legionnaires' disease have tripled in the last decade, U.S. health officials said Thursday, but the risk of dying from it is lower because of more effective treatment.

Legionnaires most often strikes the elderly and can cause deadly pneumonia. The germ spreads through mist or vapor from contaminated water or air conditioning systems.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports 3,522 cases in 2009, the most since Legionnaires was first identified in 1976. There were only 1,110 cases in 2000. CDC officials think the increase may be partly because there are more old people.

To be sure, Legionnaires remains uncommon. Just 8 percent of its victims died in the last decade, compared to 20 percent in the 1980s and 1990s. But it still kills hundreds of Americans each year. Despite the low case count, experts believe the disease sickens and even hospitalizes thousands every year whose cases aren't reported.

The increase in cases is worrisome, said study co-author Dr. Lee Hampton, a CDC epidemiologist. "We need to minimize the risk of people dying from this," he said.

The disease got its name from an outbreak at a Philadelphia convention of the American Legion in 1976 when more than 200 people were sickened and 34 died. The outbreak drew intense media coverage, and months later health investigators fingered the bacterial cause. The germ apparently had spread through the convention hotel's air-conditioning system.

Early signs of the disease can include high fever, chills and a cough. Fortunately, some of the drugs most commonly used against pneumonia are first-line treatments against Legionnaires.

Cases of the disease held relatively steady in the 1980s-90s, but rose since 2000.

The CDC relies on doctors, hospitals and state health departments to report cases when they occur, and agency officials believe the national case count is an underestimate.

Social Media Expands to New Roles in Finance

Social media has matured into the enterprise in the last 12 months, say two top guns at Autonomy, a search, analysis and marketing company.

Andrew Joiner, co-CEO of Autonomy Promote -- a business unit that spans multi-channel approaches to customers and George Tziahanas, vice president of compliance at Autonomy, joined in a conversation about how its technology is being used to promote financial services and serve customers.

Social media has to be done carefully to avoid running into problems with regulators.

On the marketing side, research analysts can use all the friends they can find, according to Joiner .

An investment bank with star research analysts can use social media to promote them.

“Social media is a wonderful broadcast medium if you can maintain quality. Firms want to embrace the network effect to publish research and to have their research analysts have friends.”

Autonomy Promote’s innovative technologies make it possible to understand customers by drawing on everything from transaction history to cross channel interactions, user-generated content, customer and community behavior and third-party content to deliver content which is relevant content to each individual visitor, according to the company.

This new approach to marketing extracts the meaning from every interaction a firm has  with customers - even "unstructured" formats like web pages, social networks, phone call recordings and video. This permits taking strategic actions based on a deep understanding of customers, competitors, and markets.

Investment banks can also monitor social networks to create profitable trading ideas. Some hedge funds are creating portfolios of concepts across news sources like Twitter and other social media looking for early indications of personnel departures, management shakeups and changes in factory news to see if they can incorporate the information for an algorithmic perspective.

Tziahanas, who works the compliance side of social media, said that as banks are starting their foray into social media the lawyers and compliance officers are very aggressive because they are scared of the new communications tools. As a result, they are relying on canned messaging, which sort of defeats the point of social media.

At a New York bank, lawyers decided Tweets were mass advertising, so any Tweet required approval before it went out. Another used Twitter contacts to direct customers into another channel like email or private Twitter messages where they can be more open and communicative.

They see more action on the lower end of financial services, such as retail banking and retail brokerage as more involved in using social media.

Autonomy makes compliance easier by scanning outbound Twitter or Facebook postings much the way it performs compliance on email looking for potential compliance problems.

“Capturing interactions is something we have already been doing,” said Tziahanas. More than 400 million messages pass through its supervision and filter technology every month.

“The underlying technology is our ability to access and understand unstructured information,” he added. “We have a platform we can deploy against any number of sources to see patterns of what people are saying. We look for certain types of patterns such as harassment, suitability or front running -- a little bit of everything and we do it at massive scale.”

In an Autonomy whitepaper, “Social Media and the Shifting Information Compliance Landscape,” Tziahanas and Eric Crespolini, vice president of eDiscovery Technologies at Autonomy, cite three areas of compliance which organizations should look at: scope of discovery in social media, potential privacy and freedom of expression issues and specific regulatory requirements while warning that “...social media issues are not clear-cut and will require solutions that are flexible and can address sometimes contradictory requirements.”

When it comes to maintaining records as required by SEC regulations, it isn’t clear who can have access to Facebook records or who owns them. The whitepaper notes that Facebook has successfully fought subpoenas for discovery. Federal privacy rules for electronic communications provide strong protection for individuals and create risks for organizations that try to capture and monitor their employees’ use of social media since that may violate state or federal privacy laws. Employers who try to discipline staff for comments on Facebook can run into Federal laws, especially if the employees are union members and come under the National Labor Relations Act. Just because employees are using social media during company time does not necessarily justify monitoring what they communicating, the authors add.

Capturing content, including comments posted on a Facebook wall, can open a company to risks, they say. “...enterprises should be extremely cautious in purposely gathering non-business-related content, as capturing private and personal information may impose new obligations and create new risks to the firm.”

Hmm, that seems to contradict what they said in the interview about using Autonomy to capture all sorts of information about customers for improved sales potential.

They suggest separating business and private identities for social media to minimize the capture of personal or private information.

Autonomy can also check inbound messages because there’s nothing quite like solving a customer problem to create an opportunity for cross-selling or up-selling. The software works across channels, just the way customers do, but not always the way banks think of interacting with customers. Using Autonomy, a bank can apply the same policies to phone calls, web visits, email or a Facebook message.

“Customer interactions from the financial institution’s perspective will become more multi-channel,” said Joiner. “Customers don’t care how they reach you because they think of it as talking to the entity. You will increasingly see fragmented customer interactions and financial services firms will want platforms to engage with customers wherever they are. Social media will become an accepted communication channel because it is where your friends are and where your customers are. Firms that embrace it will be at a competitive advantage.”

Chord Guitar Maher Zain - Insya Allah

intro
G C Ab C Bb C Ab G

C                       F
Everytime you feel like you cannot go on
    Bb
You feel so lost
G
That your so alone
        C
All you see is night
    F
And darkness all around
    A
You feel so helpless
          G
You can’t see which way to go
         Bb                   F
Don’t despair and never loose hope
        Bb                    G
Cause Allah is always by your side
        C
Insha Allah
        Ab
Insha Allah
        Bb
Insha Allah
                 G
you’ll find your way
2X

C                F
Everytime you commit one more mistake
    Bb
You feel you can’t repent
    G
And that its way too late
        C                    F
Your’re so confused, wrong decisions you have made
Bb                       G
Haunt your mind and your heart is full of shame

         Bb                   F
Don’t despair and never loose hope
        Bb                    G
Cause Allah is always by your side
        C
Insha Allah
        Ab
Insha Allah
        Bb
Insha Allah
                 G
you’ll find your way
2X

C Ab C Ab C Ab F G

          Eb
Turn to Allah
     C              
He’s never far away
         G
Put your trust in Him
                     Bb
Raise your hands and pray
         Eb
OOO Ya Allah
                     C
Guide my steps don’t let me go astray
           G                           Bb
You’re the only one that showed me the way,
              Eb
Showed me the way
              C
Showed me the way
               G   C
Showed me the way

        D
Insha Allah
        Bb
Insha Allah
        C
Insha Allah
                 A
you’ll find your way  

you can download the music in here