Automatic design of conformal cooling circuits for rapid tooling

Abstract This paper presents an automatic method for designing conformal cooling circuits, which is an essential component that directly affects the quality and timing for products fabricated by rapid tooling. To reduce the time of cooling and to control the uniformity of temperature and volumetric shrinkage, industry expects to have cooling channels that are conformal to the shape of the products. We achieve the goal of automatically designing such conformal cooling circuits in a twofold manner. First, the relationship between the conformal cooling and the geometry shape of cooling circuit is formulated. Based on that, we investigate a geometric modeling algorithm to design a cooling circuit approaching conformal cooling. Simulations have been made to verify the advantage of the cooling circuit generated by our algorithm.

[1]  Hiroyuki Kagawa,et al.  Fabrication of Cooling Channels in the Injection Molding by Laser Metal Sintering , 2008, Int. J. Autom. Technol..

[2]  S. P. Lloyd,et al.  Least squares quantization in PCM , 1982, IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory.

[3]  Kamlakar P Rajurkar,et al.  Journal of Manufacturing Science and Engineering, Transactions of the ASME: Guest editorial , 2010 .

[4]  Neil A. Dodgson,et al.  Fast Marching farthest point sampling for point clouds and implicit surfaces , 2003 .

[5]  K. M. Au,et al.  A scaffolding architecture for conformal cooling design in rapid plastic injection moulding , .

[6]  Rémy Prost,et al.  Generic Remeshing of 3D Triangular Meshes with Metric-Dependent Discrete Voronoi Diagrams , 2008, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics.

[7]  Syed H. Masood,et al.  Finite Element Thermal Analysis of Conformal Cooling Channels in Injection Moulding , 2006 .

[8]  Charlie C. L. Wang.  CyberTape: an interactive measurement tool on polyhedral surface , 2004, Comput. Graph..

[9]  Dinesh Manocha,et al.  Reliable sweeps , 2009, Symposium on Solid and Physical Modeling.

[10]  Chung-lun Li,et al.  A feature-based approach to injection mould cooling system design , 2001, Comput. Aided Des..

[11]  A. Mateus,et al.  Studies of rapid soft tooling with conformal cooling channels for plastic injection moulding , 2003 .

[12]  Emanuel M. Sachs,et al.  Rapid thermal cycling with low thermal inertia tools , 2009 .

[13]  Daniel F. Walczyk,et al.  A Preliminary Study of Sealing and Heat Transfer Performance of Conformal Channels and Cooling Fins in Laminated Tooling , 2007 .

[14]  D. E. Dimla,et al.  Design and optimisation of conformal cooling channels in injection moulding tools , 2005 .

[15]  Aristides A. G. Requicha,et al.  Offsetting operations in solid modelling , 1986, Comput. Aided Geom. Des..

[16]  S. Allen,et al.  The design of conformal cooling channels in injection molding tooling , 2001 .

[17]  A Y C Nee,et al.  The application of U-shape milled grooves for cooling of injection moulds , 2002 .

[18]  Charlie C. L. Wang,et al.  Fast Intersection-Free Offset Surface Generation From Freeform Models With Triangular Meshes , 2011, IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering.

[19]  Hae-Sim Park,et al.  Design of conformal cooling channels for an automotive part , 2009 .

[20]  Jay Shoemaker,et al.  Moldflow Design Guide: A Resource for Plastics Engineers , 2006 .

[21]  P. K. Kundu,et al.  Fluid Mechanics: Fourth Edition , 2008 .

[22]  M. Cima,et al.  Production of injection molding tooling with conformal cooling channels using the three dimensional printing process , 2000 .

[23]  Jean-Marc Chassery,et al.  Approximated Centroidal Voronoi Diagrams for Uniform Polygonal Mesh Coarsening , 2004, Comput. Graph. Forum.