Design Thinking in MIM
Introduction
Design thinking is a cost-effective, non-linear process. This is an effective way for our MIM engineering team to understand customer’s project, challenge assumptions, redefine problems, create innovation solutions to prototype and test our solutions. Effective MIM design thinking including normal five stage empathize, define, ideate, prototype and test. This is the most useful way to solve ill-defined or unknown problems in MIM process.
In MIM manufacturing industry, there are various challenges we have to face. The major one is purchasing the perfect MIM parts and sub-assemblies through the right vendor. More and more customers want to make the suppler chain leaner, in order to eliminate waste and assure fewer variables in producing process. ZCMIM is the most professional MIM company in China. We provide the simplest solution for designers and engineers, which is integrating of various discrete components.
Integration
Metal Injection Molding, or MIM, is a very successful metal molding process. It provides the integration solutions to reduce the number of sub-assembly parts, although increase the complexity of component design. This technology has the unique feature to simplify the complex MIM parts manufacturing. Metal injection molding process involves mold design and production, which enable producing of large quantities in high tolerance and repeat-ability. Firstly, we can injection mold complex parts with different features in MIM molds. Then, after professional debinding and sintering process, we can produce final net-shape metal parts easily. Especially in multiple-cavity design, our engineering team can incorporate complex parts design into mold design easily. This will guarantee the final productivity without any additional assemble process.
Design
The main reason of new product fail in manufacturing industry is the high cost and low quantity of production. Excellent products designs will never come to reality, except we find the most cost-effective way. However, MIM technology can bridge the gap between complex designs to commercial success. It has the nature capacity to produce complex metal parts with economical cost and high quantity. A high precise multiple-cavity MIM tooling can assist us rise production to 100,000 in a few days from the first production day. This make ZCMIM products are suitable for mobile phone parts, medical devices, automotive or other industrial applications. Once our customers requires their products to launch in market, our production quantity can ramp up rapidly to satisfy any requirement.
There is an interesting example from the mobile phone industry. As we can scans seesee,ee the following image of the phone button. Normally, mobile phone companies have to produce 5-6 million mobile phones per month for selling in worldwide. There are 3 issues to fix before high volume production: small size, complex structure and steepest ramp-up rate of quantity. The only effective way is metal injection molding. MIM technology can produce these products with less cost than conventional technologies, and make the part production commercially successful.
Materials
The conventional metal manufacturing technologies sometime cannot work with design thinking. In reason of there are strict Design for Manufacturability principles. While MIM design process has no traditional limits. Designers have more freedom to draw complex geometries, which can be smaller, various component’s integration with superior functions.
MIM technology also brings freedom of material and mechanical properties for designers. In convention CNC process, there only are some standard available raw materials for selection. All materials type and mechanical properties are limited to a small area. Meanwhile, MIM process apply fine alloy powder as the raw materials, this encourages MIM manufacturer to customize various alloy with special properties. In order to satisfy designer’s particular function requirement. Such as, in automotive applications, certain parts properties are high temperature resistance, high elongation, corrosion resistance. This can be achieved by changing the Ni and Mo percentage in common standard carbon steels. Similarly, medical MIM parts, can be produced with materials of ASTM F75 or ASTM F1537. These kinds of MIM metal have excellent properties in wear resistance, bio-compatibility, corrosion resistance, high strength and nonmagnetic.
Prototypes
MIM technology have various method to increase prototype sample speed. The most common method is soft tooling with aluminum molds, which is available for 5000 samples for large scale testing with short production time. Other complimenting technology like binder jetting 3D printing can also produce the prototypes in faster speed, but we need to consider the production cost in the actual situation. ZCMIM has a professional engineering team to assist the designers finish the prototyping process with less time, we can provide the actual prototype samples in less than fortnight after the final 3D&2D model are confirmed.
Conclusion
MIM Design Thinking paves the way of innovative parts creation, all products can be produced at the right time of demand without uneconomical stocking. Our high capacity can reach to millions per month in short time as demand. ZCMIM can produce any complex metal parts just in time, we can satisfy all our demand with the most competitive price. Contact us now for your next new innovative project now.
