Cooling channel configuration in injection moulds

According to the common practice of injection moulding, 70% to 80% of the cycle time is used to cool down the manufactured product. Components with curves, ribs, bosses and different wall thicknesses require full consideration of uniform cooling to reduce cycle time, thereby avoiding non-uniform shrinkage and warpage. Recently, with the manufacturing flexibility offered by Layer Manufacturing (LM) technologies such as Selective Laser Sintering (SLS) and Selective Laser Melting (SLM) almost full design freedom becomes available. This paper presents an approach to determine the most suitable cooling layout configuration such as conventional cooling, conformal, or surface cooling required for a moulded part. The objective of this process is to enable the optimisation and prediction of the mould cooling cycle time.