As the third largest plastics processing technique, blow molding is one of the fastest growing industries worldwide. In this paper, a series of simulations on the parison formation in plastics extrusion blow molding were implemented using finite element method. Then a neural network model was developed based on the numerical results. The effects of the extrusion die inclination angle, die gap, and parison length on the parison swells can be predicted using the network model. The hybrid method combining the finite element and neural network can shorten the time for the predictions drastically.

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