Cooling Performance of an Additively Manufactured Lattice Structural Conformal Cooling Channel for Hot Stamping

The design principle of an additively manufactured (AMed) lattice structural conformal cooling channel for hot stamping is investigated. AM with selective laser melting is adopted to fabricate a lab-scale rapid cooling die filled with conformal lattice structures, which provide structural stiffness, act as thermal fins, and expedite the occurrence of turbulent flow in the channel. Three different surface area densities with the same relative volume density were considered to evaluate the heat transfer and cooling performance. Computational fluid dynamics is used to analyze the flow of coolant in the lattice structures with different surface area densities. The experimental and computational results show that if the surface density of the lattice structure is selected properly, the cooling performance can be enhanced significantly while maintaining a constant relative volume density, which directly affects the weight reduction and stiffness of the cooling die.