Topology Optimization for the Design of Conformal Cooling System in Thin-wall Injection Molding Based on BEM

A topology optimization approach is developed to design the conformal cooling system for injection molding in this paper. During the design process, the cycle-averaged approach is used to simplify the analysis of the cooling process, and the boundary element method (BEM) is adopted to solve the governing equations and calculate the sensitivities. The optimization starts from the complicated network of channels, and the radius of each channel section and the location of each node are selected as the design variables. The topology of the cooling system can be modified by deleting excessively thin channel sections. We pick out two representative example models with areas that are hard to cool to test the effectiveness of the proposed optimization approach. The results show that our method can improve both efficiency and uniformity of the cooling process.