Technology frontier: special-shaped waterway and metal 3D printing applications

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The cooling system (Cooling System) is one of the design mold engineering. When the plastic material of the mold is heated and injected into the mold with lower temperature, it needs to wait for the mold to cool to obtain the finished product. At this time, the cooling system needs to be cooled and demoulded. The cooling system affects the demoulding time, product quality, product appearance, etc. The impact quality is huge.

The cooling system of the mold is the waterway. In other words, the design of the waterway affects the cooling quality of the mold. The purpose of the waterway design is to evenly cool the product and push it out in a shorter time. The traditional mold cooling (Mold Cooling) uses a simple method, with a straight waterway design, making it easier but requiring heat dissipation. A long time.

Shaped waterway and traditional waterway comparison

Conformal Cooling is a unique manufacturing technology used by the mold industry. With the advent of mold flow analysis software, designers can use software to analyze heat dissipation of molds and waterways, shorten manufacturing time, and improve manufacturing quality. Looking further, the design of the cooling water circuit of the mold can also adopt an irregular shape design to improve the cooling efficiency. This is the basic principle of the special-shaped waterway.

However, the construction method for producing irregular waterways has been limited by existing technologies. The method is to drill or cut the welding of the molds. The construction is not only very complicated, but the life of the molds is also shortened due to secondary processing. Therefore, it is a long period. Time, special-shaped waterway design can only stay in the theoretical stage, but after the emergence of metal 3D printing, these issues have achieved breakthrough improvement.

Why does metal 3D printing change the limits of waterway design? This must be said from the 3D printing technology, 3D printing is a rapid progress of engineering technology in recent years, the biggest advantage is that the principle of 3D printing is additive manufacturing, so there is no modeling restrictions, even if the complex shape and pipeline within the object, 3D printing does not pose a problem, and the mold industry notes the value of 3D metal printing.

Regardless of the diameter of the mold waterway, or the internal angle processing that is difficult for general lathes to perform, metal 3D printing can be easily achieved. Even better, even if the complex waterway planning method is complex, metal 3D printing only needs to be performed once. Can accurately complete the mold and shaped waterway at the same time.

Shaped waterway benefits

According to Bastech's successful case shared by 3D Systems, it can be known that the modified mold after the special type of waterway combined with 3D printing technology can bypass the top pin and the fixing screw, and even if the waterway is far away from the area, the desired cooling quality can be achieved.

Bastech said that the remarkable benefits of special-shaped waterways are as follows: 1. Mold design time is reduced by 75%; 2. Manpower at the manufacturing end can save 50%; 3. It saves 14% of the injection mold production cycle; 4. The manufacturing cost is saved by 16%.

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