Cooling Systems Analysis for Plastic Mold Injection Tools
Abstract
The Plastic Injection Mold (PIM) industry has been searching for new technologies that improve the manufacturing of parts by reducing the production time and cost as well as increasing the quality of the product. The cooling systems in the PIM are designed initially to be straight-drilled into the mold, but this manufacturing process has traditionally not been very effective, since for molded parts with complex geometries, the cooling channels are not able to reach certain areas. This limitation has led the industry to develop conformal cooling channels that use the additive manufacturing technology, which allows the cooling channels to conform the part’s working surface. So, the production cycle time can be reduced and the temperature distribution in the molded part is more uniform to provide better quality in the product. That said, the cost of using conformal cooling in the manufacturing process has been demonstrated to be higher than the cost of conventional cooling channels Therefore, this research aims to investigate the advantages of conformal cooling and the degree to which it improves product quality and manufacturing cycle time. To be able to carried out these studies, CFD simulations using NX-FLOEFD by Siemens are performed to investigate the possibilities of improve conventional cooling channels, and then to compare them with a designed conformal cooling channel. The parametric studies are performed for different configurations and different operating points to improve these systems. A conformal cooling system is designed in this study for the same product part following design recommendations from previous studies. The study indicates that the conformal cooling channels proven to have a better cooling performance providing a higher quality product.