Automatic design of conformal cooling circuits for rapid tooling

This paper presents an automatic method for designing conformal cooling circuits, which is an essential component that directly affects the quality and timing for products fabricated by rapid tooling. To reduce the time of cooling and to control the uniformity of temperature and volumetric shrinkage, industry expects to have cooling channels that are conformal to the shape of the products. We achieve the goal of automatically designing such conformal cooling circuits in a twofold manner. First, the relationship between the conformal cooling and the geometry shape of cooling circuit is formulated. Based on that, we investigate a geometric modeling algorithm to design a cooling circuit approaching conformal cooling. Simulations have been made to verify the advantage of the cooling circuit generated by our algorithm. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.