Optimization of cooling pipe system of plastic molding

Abstract

In a plastic injection molding, design of cooling pipe system is one of the important problems to reduce internal residual stresses of molded products. If plastic materials in the injection molding die are cooled down uniformly and slowly, generation of the residual stresses can be reduced. In this paper, a new method to design a cooling pipe system inthe plastic injection molding die taking account of coolant flow in the pipe are presented. To consider the effect of the coolant flow, two kinds of models assumed plastic injection die are prepared. And shape optimization techniques are applied to design the cooling pipe system in the models. To evaluate the optimality, two kinds of evaluation functions, one is to obtain uniform temperature distribution and the other is to control cooling rate, are defined. © 2006 International Federation for Information Processing.