Porous cooling passageway for rapid plastic injection moulding

The application of solid freeform fabrication (SFF) techniques to the design of plastic injection moulds has presented a new challenge to mould design and analysis strategy. Injection mould cooling process is important from the viewpoint of quality and productivity of tooling part. Efficient injection mould cooling systems can reduce the cooling time required and hence improve the productivity. Recently, many researchers have made attempts to design conformal cooling channel by various rapid tooling technologies. However, the cooling performance cannot turn up to mould engineer's expectation. Undesired injection moulded defects such as thermal stress, warpage or shrinkage are unavoidable. The paper, thus, proposes a novel approach using porous structure cooling passageway for the design of more uniform cooling performance in rapid plastic injection mould. Cooling performance of the proposed porous structure cooling passageway is investigated with mechanical feature. Computer-aided engineering (CAE) analysis is utilized for linear static analysis. The results of the proposed porous cooling will be compared with the traditional injection mould cooling model.