Thermal and Design Sensitivity Analyses for Cooling System of Injection Mold, Part 2: Design Sensitivity Analysis

Abstract

DSA will ultimately play an important role in the design optimization process. Part 2 of this paper presents an efficient and accurate methodology for the DSA of the cooling stage of the injection molding process. The DSA program developed in the present study utilizes the implicit differentiation of the boundary integral equations and the B.C.s presented in Part I with respect to all DVs to yield the sensitivity equations. In this DSA, we have considered various DVs as follows: (i) (DVs related to processing conditions) inlet coolant bulk temperature and inlet coolant volumetric flow rate of each cooling channel inlet, and (ii) (DVs related to mold cooling system design) radius and location of each cooling channel. Two sample problems are solved to demonstrate the accuracy and efficiency of the present DSA formulation and to discuss the characteristics of each DV.