Transient Analysis of an Injection Mould with Conformal Cooling Channels

Abstract

Injection moulding is a manufacturing process to create plastic parts and it consists of four major processes injection, packing, cooling and ejection. Cooling process takes almost half of the whole cycle time in injection moulding. Injection moulds were cooled by creating straight drilled channel in mould but that channel does not provide uniform and efficient cooling since it does not conform to the shape of the mould. Conformal cooling channel takes the exact shape of the mould cavity, and therefore it provides efficient cooling. Circular, profiled circular and trapezoidal profile cooling channels have been designed for injection mould. To optimize the effectiveness of the cooling, channels with constant heat transfer between mould and cooling channels, constant perimeter and different convective heat transfer coefficient have been taken. Thermal analysis has performed on Ansys 14.5 and Taguchi method has used to optimize the best cooling channel.