Injection Molded Phone Stand

Project: Design a phone stand for injection molding.

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Duration: 1 week in November 2021.

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Objective: Design a phone stand with the BU logo on it that held a phone at a 15º angle from horizontal, had a wall thickness of roughly 4mm, and could be manufactured through injection molding with a simple two part mold. 

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Approach: Initially different concepts were sketched to try and figure out a design that could be injection molded. The bottom was chosen to be curved so small pieces of dirt on a table or desk wouldn't cause the stand to be wobbly, ribs wouldn't be needed, and because it had aesthetic value. Once the rough idea of the design was determined it was modeled in SolidWorks with the appropriate draft angles, wall thickness, and fillets.

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Challenges: The hardest part of design process was trying to come up with something that had even wall thickness and no overhangs/needed side-actions etc. so that it could be made with a simple two part mold.

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Solutions: Loosely sketching out different designs helped visualize what worked and what didn't until a viable design was reached.

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Results: Unfortunately there was no way to ever test the design with a mold-flow analysis program or actually manufacture the molds to see how it would turn out in practice. It was graded as a viable design. Additionally, I decided to make the two mold halves to see what those would look like, although I didn't include a sprue, gate, cooling holes, ejector pins, or account for shrinkage when designing the mold.

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Future Improvements: When designing the mold there was a very thin and sharp feature on the mold core, which could be prone to damage or difficult to manufacture, due to the design of the phone stand. This could be avoided by changing the phone stand design slightly. Additionally, the bottom of the phone stand could be improved to avoid the two mold halves meeting on a curved surface since that could be prone to issues.