Thermal and Mechanical Assessments of the 3D-Printed Conformal Cooling Channels: Computational Analysis and Multi-object
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JMEPEG https://doi.org/10.1007/s11665-020-05251-5
Thermal and Mechanical Assessments of the 3D-Printed Conformal Cooling Channels: Computational Analysis and Multi-objective Optimization Suping Shen, Baris Burak Kanbur, Yi Zhou, and Fei Duan Submitted: 8 August 2020 / Revised: 21 September 2020 / Accepted: 3 October 2020 Conformal cooling is an additive manufacturing-based solution and it is a rapidly developing method for reducing the cooling time of the plastic injection process. The present study investigates the thermal and mechanical performances of the 3D-printed conformal cooling channels using computational analyses and multi-objective optimization. For a real injection mold product, two different conformal cooling channel profiles, which are circular and elongated, are analyzed individually. Their cooling time, temperature nonuniformity, and pressure drop are assessed. Compared to the traditional channels, the cooling time of designed CCCs is reduced in the range of 30-60%. The cooling and fatigue life performances of the elongated channel are analyzed for different channel pathways and cross section areas. As for the circular channel, the coolant temperature, volume flow rate, and channel diameter are selected as the parameters within the ranges of 288.0-298.0 K, 1.0-10.0 L/min, and 2.1-2.5 mm, respectively. According to these parameters, the multi-objective optimization study is performed and the best trade-off point is found at the channel diameter of 2.5 mm, coolant temperature of 297 K, and the flow rate of 1 L/min when all the objectives have equal weights in the optimization problem. Keywords
additive manufacturing, computational simulations, conformal cooling, mechanical analysis, multi-objective optimization, plastic injection, thermal analysis
molding relies largely on it. The improvement of cooling techniques can lead to low cooling time (and inherently cycle time) as well as a high product produced rate. The injection molding cooling is based on the cooling channels that are conventional straight channels fabricated via traditional machining tools (e.g., drilling). However, the recent developments in additive manufacturing (AM) or 3D-printing techniques allow engineers to design more complex but more
1. Introduction Plastic injection molding is a cost- and time-efficient way to manufacture plastic parts so that it is a feasible process for fabricating a mass amount of identical plastic parts quickly. The process is simply explained as the injection of the melted plastic into the mold, where it is cooled and solidified into the final part (Ref 1). In the cycle of injection molding, cooling is the most important step which takes up nearly 70-80% of the total cycle time (Ref 2) because the efficiency of injection This article is an invited submission to JMEP selected from presentations at the 8th Asia Conference on Mechanical and Materials Engineering (ACMME 2020) held June 11–14, 2020, at National University of Singapore, Singapore, and has been expanded from the original presentation. S.P. Shen and
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