Design and FEM analysis of the milled groove insert method for cooling of plastic injection moulds

During an injection moulding process, it is very difficult to achieve efficient and balanced cooling. It is also difficult to generate an optimal cooling design for industrial parts automatically. In this paper, a milled groove insert method in mould cooling was proposed for cooling of medium and large plastic parts. The advantages of this method include a better cooling effect, ease and flexibility of design, characteristics of auto-design and considerable savings on the coolant flow rate. A household iron part was studied and the assemblies were modelled. The cooling analyses of the mould assembly and thermal stress analysis of plastic parts were performed using ABAQUS/Standard to compare the proposed method to the most popular straight-drilled cooling channel method. The thermal stress analysis was run, consequently, based on the result of the cooling analysis. Simulation results have confirmed the merits of the milled groove insert method.