The cooling system plays a crucial role in determining the productivity and quality of an injection molding process. With the current growth of Solid Freeform Fabrication (SFF) techniques, mold designers have been striving for not only improvement in cooling system performance but also for a method to do so automatically. In this paper, a method is proposed for developing a conformal cooling system that facilitates uniform cooling over the entire mold surface with minimum cycle time. Based on the temperature distribution after the filling stage, the mold surface is split into zones which will be cooled by optimized subconformal channels obtained from the optimization process. The optimization process in which the objective function is stated as minimization of the cooling time with boundaries ensuring a realistic design will optimize the cooling system layout in terms of cooling channel size and location. Finally, all subcooling channels are combined to generate the entire conformal cooling system for the injection mold.
NOMENCLATUREQ KS : heat flux from molding, kJ/m Q E : heat exchange with the environment, kJ/m Q C : heat exchange with the coolant, kJ/m t C : cooling time, s s : part thickness, mm a : distance between two cooling channels, mm b : distance from the mold surface to the center of the cooling channel, mm d C : diameter of cooling channel, mm T M : mold temperature, o C T E : demolding temperature, o C i m : latent heat of fusion of polymer, kJ/kg c p m : specific heat of the melt, kJ/(kg o C) ρ m : melt density, g/cm 3 λ m : thermal conductivity of the melt, W/(m o C) T water : temperature of coolant, o C T W : mold wall temperature, o C λ ST
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.