Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE INSTITUTION OF MECHANICAL ENGINEERS PART B-JOURNAL OF ENGINEERING MANUFACTURE
Volume 224, Issue B3, Pages 385-402Publisher
SAGE PUBLICATIONS LTD
DOI: 10.1243/09544054JEM1523
Keywords
rapid tooling; thermal management mould; DMT process; mould design; cooling characteristics; productivity
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The objective of this paper is to manufacture a thermal management mould with three different materials and conformal cooling channels using a laser-aided direct metal tooling process to obtain both rapid and uniform cooling characteristics. The geometry of the thermal management mould is decomposed into three parts, including a moulding part consisting of P21 injection tool steel, a mid-layer consisting of Monel 400 material, and a base part consisting of Ampcoloy 940 material, according to the functionality of each part. The base part is designed as a heat sink and the midlayer is adopted to reduce the thermal stress in the joined regions. In this paper, the features of the design and a rapid tooling process for the thermal management mould as well as the characteristics of the mould are discussed. Several injection-moulding experiments are performed to investigate the practical applicability of the fabricated mould and the effects of the cooling time on the quality of the moulded product. The results of the experiments show that the cooling time of the thermal management mould can be shortened to 3 s. Through comparison of the product from the thermal management mould with that of a previously designed mould, it is shown that the designed mould can improve both the cycle time and the quality of the product.
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