Effects of the injection compression process parameters on residual stress of plastic lenses

Residual stress affects significantly the quality of plastic lenses. In this paper, the influence of process parameters on the residual stress of injection compression molded plastic lenses was investigated by orthogonal simulation. The results show that the effect of compression delay time on residual stress was the most significant, followed by compression distance and compression speed, which are both related to the compression process. Then, the relationship between the residual stress obtained by simulations and the optical path difference measured by the experiment was compared by single factor experiments of four key injection compression molding process parameters. The change trends were similar, which proves that the numerical simulation has the potential to predict the residual stress of plastic lenses and optimize the process parameters, so as to improve their optical quality.