Optimum design of injection molding cooling system via boundary element method

경계요소법을 이용한 사출성형금형 냉각시스템의 최적설계

The cooling stage is the very critical and most time consuming stage of the injection molding process, thus it cleary affects both the productivity and the part quality. Even through there are several commercialized package programs available in the injection molding industry to analyze the cooling performance of the injection molding coling stage, optimization of the cooling system has npt yet been accomplished in the literature due to the difficulty in the sensitivity analysis. However, it would be greatly desirable for the mold cooling system designers to have a computer aided design system for the cooling stage. With this in mind, the present study has successfully developed an interated computer aided design system for the injection molding cooling system. The CAD system utilizes the sensitivity analysis via a Boundary Element Method, which we recently developed, and the well-known CONMIN alforuthm as an optimization technique to minimize a weighted combination (objective function) of the temperature non-uniformity over the part surface and the cooling time related to the productivity with side constranits for the design reality. In the proposed objective function , the weighting parameter between the temperature non-uniiformity abd the cooling time can be adjusted according to user's interest. In this cooling system optimization, various design variable are considered as follows : (i) (design variables related to processing conditions) inlet coolant bulk temperature and volumetric flow rate of each cooling channel, and (ii) (design variables related to mold cooling system design) radius and location of each cooling channel. For this optimum design problem, three different radius and location of each cooling channel. For this optimum design problem, three different strategies are suffested based upon the nature of design variables. Three sample problems were successfully solved to demonstrated the efficiency and the usefulness of the CAD system.