Optimal cooling system design for the injection molding process

Abstract

A computer-aided optimal design system was developed to improve the performance of a cooling system for injection molding. This was done by minimizing a weighted combination of the uniformity of the part temperature and the cooling time. The C O " algorithm was adopted to obtain the optimal design using the special boundary integral formulation and a corresponding design sensitivity analysis formulation. Design variables related to the processing conditions (i.e., inlet coolant temperature and volumetric flow rate of each cooling channel) and mold cooling system design (radius and location of each cooling channel) were considered. Three different optimization strategies are suggested, and three Sample problems were solved to demonstrate the efficiency and the usefulness of this optimization procedure.

Design and simulation-based optimization of cooling channels for plastic injection mold

“…The heat exchanges with the coolant is taken place by force convection, and the heat exchanges with environment is transported by convection and radiation at side faces of the mold and heat conduction into machine platens. In application, the mold exterior faces can be treated as adiabatic because the heat lost through these faces is less than 5% (Park & Kwon, 1998;Zhou & Li, 2005). Therefore, the heat exchange can be considered as solely the heat exchange between the hot polymer and the coolant.…”

“…To simplify the mathematical model, some of the assumptions are applied (Park & Kwon, 1998;Lin, 2002). The objective of mold cooling analysis is to find the temperature distribution in the molded part and mold cavity surface during cooling stage.…”

“…When the molding process reaches the steady-state after several cycles, the average temperature of the mold is constant even though the true temperature fluctuates periodically during the molding process because of the cyclic interaction between the hot plastic and the cold mold. For the convenience and efficiency in computation, cycle-averaged temperature approach is used for mold region and transition analysis is applied to the molded part (Park & Kwon, 1998;Lin, 2002;Rännar, 2008).…”

Optimization of Injection Moulded Polymer Automotive Components

“…The optimised design of the cooling systems of injection moulds has been performed over the last decades. Park and Know (Park, 1998) developed an algorithm to improve the performance of a cooling system by solving the thermal problem by the boundary element method. They proposed that the optimization with respect to all the design variables (mould cooling system and processing conditions) at the same type is the most appropriate strategy.…”

“…Processing conditions can be optimised. The optimization of the mould cooling system is based normally in two main design objective functions (Park, 1998): a) minimization of the cooling time; and b) temperature uniformity over the part surface. The design variables include: inlet coolant temperature; inlet coolant flow rate; cooling channel diameter; and cooling channel location.…”