Design flash gate will be applied to the plate shaped molded product. This type is effective at preventing deformation by suppressing residual strain. It appears a litter in mold design.
You can read all the content about gate design at here.
1. Advantages and disadvantages of flash gate.
A. Advantages.
+ Flash gate usually use with big product and thickness is thin. If resin of product is acrylic, we usually use flash gate.
+ To prevent bending of product.
+ Melt plastics easy to fill in molding cavity.
+ To prevent weld line.
B. Disadvantages.
+ Lose more time to cut gate.
+ After removed gates, appearance of product after gate position is not good.
2. How to design flash gate?
Recommended dimension is approximately 0.2 mm to 0.6 mm in thick, the land area (parallel runner) is also been kept small approximately 0.6 mm – 1 mm depend on the large and weight of product.
Dimension of flash gate can calculate by picture above.
S: Thickness of product.
H: Thickness of film gate.
L: Length of flash gate, L= 0.5~0.2 mm.
D: Diameter of runner where connect between flash gate and main runner. It calculates by the formula.
D= (S~4*S/3) + k
k=2 When a product has small length, k=4 with a product has long length.
You can read runner design at https://mechanicalengblog.com/plastic-injection-molding-runner-system/
I like how you explained that a flash gate helps suppress the residual strain of the plastic, prevent the plastic from bending, and easily melts it so that it can fill the mold cavity. This design for a flash gate seems very effective and will improve the quality of the plastic injection molding. I would suggest people use it in order to provide better quality moldings. Thanks for teaching me about how flash gates work in plastic injection molding.