Automatic optimization of the cooling of injection mold based on the boundary element method

E Mathey (1) , Luc Penazzi (2) , Fabrice Schmidt (2) , F Ronde-Oustau

1 IMT Mines Albi - IMT École nationale supérieure des Mines d'Albi-Carmaux
2 CROMeP - Centre de Recherche Outillages, Matériaux et Procédés

Part cooling during injection molding is the critical step as it is the most time consuming. An inefficient mold cooling may have dramatic consequences on cycle time and part quality and may require expensive mold rectification. In order to reduce mold and production costs, an automatic optimization of cooling device geometry and processing parameters (temperature, flow rate...) has been developed. The first step of the optimization is to choose parameters describing the geometry of the cooling device (which may be complex in case of molds obtained by prototyping process). Then numerical simulation of the heat transfer during cooling stage is coupled to a non linear constraint optimization method (sequential quadratic programming). The objective is to find the best set of parameters according to a cost function representing cooling uniformity and/or cooling speed. At each step of the optimization, the boundary element method is used to solve the heat transfer equation (the dual reciprocity method is used for transient problems) and to determine the effect of the parameters on the cost function. The main advantage of the BEM is that remeshing procedure is easier. As a validation, the method is applied to 2D mold geometries representative of difficulties arising during cooling of real industrial parts (with thickness changes or angles). The first computations show fair results.

Domaines: Sciences de l'ingénieur [physics]

E Mathey, Luc Penazzi, Fabrice Schmidt, F Ronde-Oustau. Automatic optimization of the cooling of injection mold based on the boundary element method. NUMIFORM 2004 - 8th International conference on numerical methods in industrial forming processes, Jun 2004, Columbus, United States. pp.222-227. ⟨hal-01716287⟩