The thickness analyses are very useful because in plastic structures, which are mainly obtained by injection moulding (injection moulding), the stiffness of the finished component depends on: as well as the quantity of material used and its mechanical properties, especially the geometry of the component itself.

Today, the increasing demand for weight reduction, felt especially in the automotive sector, has led designers to create geometrically complex structures, dense with reinforcing ribs that allow extremely rigid components and at the same time, very light.

Criticality in the analysis of thicknesses

However, the realization of these increasingly thin ribs brings with it some aspects of strong criticality:

• Filling difficulties, due to high surface/mass ratio in thin-walled areas;
• Very marked localized shrinkage during the cooling of the component, which creates aesthetic defects (recirculation) and sometimes breaks due to residual stresses;
• total component deformations; due to the lack of understanding of the shrinkage phenomenon during solidification on complex and highly three-dimensional components (e.g., automotive headlights)

The demand for thickness reduction is constantly growing, so thanks to this mechanical approach, industrial tomography is a technique of interesting application.

Unilab allows to use the tomography service for the study of these aspects.