The US Patent and Trademark Office has recently released Apple's latest patent related to injection molding processing technology. Injection molding, especially injection molded plastic parts, has become a highly cost-effective method for rapid production of components. The most typical approach is to select a plastic resin and inject it into the mold to obtain a plastic component with uniform physical properties.
Designers generally hope that different positions of a component have different hardness. But if a single injection molding process is used, the physical properties of the entire component will be exactly the same, that is to say, the hardness and material density will be the same. But if the secondary injection molding process is used, another material can be injected during the production process to meet the designer's requirements, but this will also increase cycle time and cost.
Apple's patent aims to address the aforementioned issues by inventing a more cost-effective approach that allows manufacturers to produce injection molds with different materials in a shorter period of time. The above picture is the injection molding system demonstrated by Apple for us.