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Abstract The cooling system of an injection mould is very important to the productivity of the injection moulding process and the quality of the moulded part. Despite the various research efforts that have been directed towards the analysis, optimization, and fabrication of cooling systems,21022
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support for the layout design of the cooling system has not been well developed. In the layout design phase, a major concern is the feasibility of building the cooling system inside the mould insert without interfering with the other mould components. This paper reports a configuration
space (C-space) method to address this important issue. While a high-dimensional C-space is generally required to deal with a complex system such as a cooling system, the special characteristics of cooling system design are exploited in the present study, and special techniques that allow
C-space computation and storage in three-dimensional or lower dimension are developed. This new method is an improvement on the heuristic method developed previously by the authors, because the C-space representation enables an automatic layout design system to conduct a more systematic search among all of the feasible designs. A simple genetic algorithm is implemented and integrated with the C-space representation to automatically generate candidate layout designs. Design examples generated by the genetic algorithm are given to demonstrate the feasibility of
the method.c
2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction
The cooling system of an injection mould is very important
to the productivity of the injection moulding process and
the quality of the moulded part. Extensive research has been
conducted into the analysis of cooling systems [1,2], and
commercial CAE systems such as MOLDFLOW [3] and
Moldex3D [4] are widely used in the industry. Research
into techniques to optimize a given cooling system has also
been reported [5–8]. Recently, methods to build better cooling
systems by using new forms of fabrication technology have
been reported. Xu et al. [9] reported the design and fabrication
of conformal cooling channels that maintain a constant distance
from the mould impression. Sun et al. [10,11] used CNC
milling to produce U-shaped milled grooves for cooling
channels and Yu [12] proposed a scaffolding structure for the
design of conformal cooling.Despite the various research efforts that have focused mainly
on the preliminary design phase of the cooling system design
process in which the major concern is the performance of
the cooling function of the system, support for the layout
design phase in which the feasibility and manufacturability of
the cooling system design are addressed has not been well
developed. A major concern in the layout design phase is the
feasibility of building the cooling system inside the mould
insert without interfering with the other mould components.
Consider the example shown in Fig. 1. It can be seen that
many different components of the various subsystems of the
injection mould, such as ejector pins, slides, sub-inserts, and
so forth, have to be packed into the mould insert. Finding the
best location for each channel of the cooling circuit to optimize
the cooling performance of the cooling system and to avoid
interference with the other components is not a simple task.
Another issue that further complicates the layout design
problem is that the inpidual cooling channels need to be
connected to form a path that connects between the inlet and
the outlet. Therefore, changing the location of a channel may require changing the other channels as well. Consider the
example shown in Fig. 2. The ideal location of each channel
to optimize the cooling performance of the system is shown
in Fig. 2(a). Assume that when the cooling system and the