Investigation sustainable factors to mature concepts at early design stage with respect to mold design criteria and plastic injection process

The main environmental concerns associated with injection molding are energy consumption and waste generation. The questions are: How does the designer measure the sustainability of a concept that may be little more than a sketch and listing of solution principles for critical functionality? This paper will focus on the limitations which can affect the product properties at mold design stage and undesirable affects after injection process on product. Clearly, this study is related to the optimization of plastic products in basic design stage. In order to achieve categorized solutions to avoid the first design stage errors, it has been tried to extract important factors which are ignored by product designers at the first stage who lack sufficient experience and knowledge about molding process. Surely, this investigation would be helpful for product designers to improve their final product concepts in order to reduce consumption time and energy at next designing stages (mold design process). The result is informative group of factors which are concluded through reviewing different papers about designing mold for product concepts.