The Arrangement of Heaters for Rubber Injection Molds using FEM and Optimal Design Method

Temperature control of a rubber injection mold is important for the dimensional accuracy of product. The main objective of this paper is to optimize the arrangement of heaters by FEM and optimal design method. Firstly, 3-dimensional transient heat transfer analysis was carried out for a square specimen mold. Results of FE analysis are a good agreement with the experimental results, showing about 1.22~7.22% error in temperature distribution. Secondly, we suggested the optimal method about an arrangement of heaters of rubber injection mold by using the optimal design technique. Distances between heater's center and the contact surface of mold, distances between heater's center and symmetric surface were considered as design variables. And the variances between the temperatures of cavity surfaces and their average temperature were used as the objective functions. Applying the optimal solution, the temperature variation was improved about 52.9~88.1 % compared to the existing mold. As a result of sensitivity analysis for design variables, design variables parallel to the direction of the split plane in mold affect the largest on the surface temperature variation in mold cavity.