Design and Production of Hybrid Products

Injection moulding (IM) is a well-known and widely employed fabrication process, which allows the production of versatile and lightweight parts, with precise dimensional tolerance. Multi-material and multi-component products are achieved by means of process variations of the conventional IM. Although the resulting products present combined properties and functionalities, the available techniques require specific machinery and complex tooling design. This paper presents a new processing approach, based in a hybrid method, for the fabrication of multi-material products, with enhanced functionality, based in the combination of IM with additive manufacturing (AM) technologies by means of overmoulding process.