Automatic Synthesis of Cooling System Design for Plastic Injection Mould

Abstract

Abstract This paper reports an automatic algorithm that synthesizes the design of cooling system for plastic injection mould. Automation in cooling system design is an important research area that has not received much attention. In the proposed method, a building block approach to design synthesis is adopted. Given a plastic part and a library of pre-defined cooling sub-systems, the algorithm first decomposes the part into features known as cooling features. For each cooling feature, the corresponding cooling sub-systems are retrieved from the library. The cooling sub-systems are then modified and combined into an initial design of the cooling system for the entire plastic part. The performance of the initial design is verified by using CMold analysis. A design synthesis program has been implemented and an example is given to illustrate the feasible of the proposed algorithm.