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die sublimation printing - Non Pro/ENGINEER question ... molding

design-engine

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Do you guys have any experience with in mold printing. I remember years ago at Motorola one of my models was camouflaged for the US Army and the engineers involved utilized a process where a graphic was laid into the mold then heated then melt was forced into that closed cavity. I believe it was refereed to as in mold graphics or maybe it called die-sublimation printing?

I have a new product that I believe can use one of those processes and need to talk to some vendors in order to understand my limitations.
 
In mold... Can do some pretty nice stuff. AFAIK you may need to apply a pre-warped deformation to the pattern/image in order for it to be regular... if that's the wish. Deep draw with decoration can be a problem. Also, molding high melting temperature materials on the back of the in-mold film might cause problems too. We don't work too much in this field, but if you're out on a limb, I can see what my contacts know...).

Otherwise 3D sublimation. You print on a fabric or paper, then apply pressure and heat and the ink penetrates the substrate. The more crystalline the material, the more 'coloursafe' and 'patternsafe' the result. This means you wont get too much post-migration of the inks, and therefore the design looks pretty good. PP doesn't work particularly well (as it's not too crystalline, ABS doesn't work, neither does PC, but then that shouldn't be too big a surprise due to material structure). PBT and POM work pretty good, as does PTT (DuPont Sorona... I work for DuPont...I only mention the trade name as I don't know if anyone else makes a similar material...). I used to work with the decoration techniques people...

There are limitations to this process too, you need to be able to drape the pattern onto the part... so deep draw once again is a tricky subject, which can introduce folds of visual defects.

There is also the Cubiq process, the one that is used to make that rather 'fake looking' carbon fibre... although i havent really looked at that for a while... maybe they are able to do some nice things..
 

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