Quality prediction in injection molding

Injection molded part quality can be improved by precise process adjustment, which could rely on in-situ measurements of part quality. Geometrical and appearance quality (visually and sensory) requirements are increasing. However, direct measurement is often not feasible industrially. Therefore, process control must rely on a prediction of parts quality attributes. This study compares prediction performances of diverse neural networks architectures with “classical” regression algorithms. Dataset comes from inline industrial measurements. Regression was performed on 97 scalar statistical features extracted from multiple acquisitions sources: thermographic images and analog signals. Haralick features were extracted. Convolutional Neural Networks were trained on thermographic images and Long Short Term Memory networks were trained on raw signals. Although the dataset was small, neural networks show better predictions scores than other regression algorithms.