Research On Automatic Generation Of Cooling System Of Plastic Injection Mold

The cooling system of a plastic injection mold plays a crucial role in determining theproductivity of the injection moulding process and the product quality. Reasonable coolingsystem design achieves uniformly distribution of mold temperature, which can preventdifferential shrinkage and other problems. The traditional design methods can’t achievehigh-quality mold design in short time, which is outdated for modern injection mold andthe requirements for high-quality and high-efficiency. This paper studies theautomatic-generate technology for the cooling system of plastic injection mold based onthe analysis of the design tools for cooling system.Initially, the process and the content of cooling system design are summarized. Inorder to meet the requirement of automatic and quick generation of the cooling system andthe need of the CAD/CAE integration, a CAD solution for cooling system design isestablished based on a new method.Considering the characteristics of the structure of cooling system, a template-basedmethod and an interaction-based method are presented. By using a combination of thesetwo methods, the unit of cooling system can be efficiently and automatically generated.The factor of manufacturing must be considerate during the layout design. A graphstructure is devised to capture a given preliminary design and a graph traversal algorithmis developed to generate candidate cooling circuits from the graph structure. A frameworkfor fuzzy evaluation of the layout designs is developed to rate the various designalternatives generated. Through using these methods, the layout design for cooling systemcan be generated automatically.Based on the above studies, a CAD system for cooling system of plastic injectionmold which achieve the automatic and quick generation of cooling system has developedusing NX7.0as the CAD development platform. The example generated from the systemproves that the system can generate cooling elements quickly and accurately andoptimized cooling circuit by less interaction operation. The system can additionallygenerate CAE analysis data for the cooling circuits so that the CAE analysis can be easily done. Therefor, the system can significantly improve the efficiency and quality of thedesign of plastic injection mold.