Polymer injection-molding is a proven manufacturing process for high volume production of precision micro- and nano- scale microfluidic devices and provides the means to realize significant cost efficiencies with increased unit volumes.
Transferring a design from the bench to a cost-efficient injection molding process presents important challenges. Factors including material selection, mold design and process capabilities must be optimized for precise and complex geometries and dimensions.
Vantiva’s Engineering Team diligently considers the multiple material and process inputs that impact product characteristics, including surface finish, mold filling and ejection/separation, shrinkage and warpage, to provide the most precise and reproducible product outcome.
Design for manufacture to optimize the injection molding process is critical for eventual transfer to high volume production. Vantiva provides general molding guidelines representing approximate ranges of dimensions and features compatible with molding and will work with you to provide a manufacturing solution designed to optimize molding and downstream processing.
Additional Design for Manufacturing elements include:
- Reducing the materials, number of parts and processing steps required for functionality
- Leveraging existing solutions
- Identifying and developing manufacturing controls
- Other means of reducing risk, e.g., prototyping, processing variability