DESIGN OF CONFORMAL COOLING CHANNELS FOR AN AUTOMOTIVE PART

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.