Generation of Conformal Cooling Channels on Generic Geometries: An Assisted Automated Approach

In the plastic injection molding industry, designing conformal cooling channels (CCCs) can be a complex, tedious and time-consuming process. Also, additive manufacturing is a costly process in the fabrication of these conformal cooling channels. To develop optimal CCCs it is required a lot of effort from the technician, starting by the design to the rheological simulation and then the re-design of the CCCs based on the simulation results. This approach aims to help mold making industry technicians design optimized CCCs more efficiently. To achieve this, a user-friendly webapp tool has been developed that allows 3D CAD files of the part to be molded to be imported and CCCs to be generated. The tool also enables conformal lines to be generated and exported, reducing the time-consuming design phase. To test and validate this tool, three existing representative real-world parts studies were selected for analysis and results comparison. The preliminary results generated by this tool are acceptable, although future work is required.