Eventos Anais de eventos
COBEF 2023
12th Brazilian Congress on Manufacturing Engineering
Performance Evaluation of Cooling Systems in Injection Moulds Made of Steel and Aluminium Through Numerical Simulations
Submission Author:
Annelise Heidrich Pietro Soares , RS
Co-Authors:
Annelise Heidrich Pietro Soares, Pedro Guilherme Carvalho de Souza Marconi, Gimaezio Gomes Carvalho, Armando Sá Ribeiro Júnior, Valter Estevão Beal, Cristiano Vasconcellos Ferreira
Presenter: Annelise Heidrich Pietro Soares
doi://10.26678/ABCM.COBEF2023.COF23-0531
Abstract
Among all techniques for manufacturing plastic parts, injection moulding stands as a process widely used by several industry sectors to produce items with complex geometry in large volumes. The demand for high-quality and low-cost parts that must quickly be available on the market is in constant growth and has great impact in the commercial and financial performance of companies. One of the most important factors, which directly affects the cost and efficiency of production, as it represents the longest stage of the process, is the cooling time of the injection cycles. In Brazil, the high-volume production of injection moulded parts is mainly done using alloy steel as the mould material. However, widely used for part prototyping and short series of production, aluminium alloys moulds have already demonstrated to be capable of producing high quality plastic parts with reduced cycle times. The design of the cooling system in steel moulds is already a well-known task, mainly due to the extensive experience about this type of tool. However, the guidelines for the definition of this system, when the moulds are made of aluminium, need information that is still little explored in the literature. Compared to steel, aluminium alloys have characteristics such as high thermal conductivity and high machinability rates, which, in addition to mechanical strength capable of withstanding the pressure and temperature of injection cycles, make them a very attractive option for mould making, even for high production. Therefore, the DEMALAP project (Demonstrador de Molde de Alumínio para Alta Produção), which aims to verify the feasibility of the use of aluminium moulds for high production, fits into this proposal. This article evaluates the consequences of a mould material change between steel and aluminium, in the cooling stage of the moulded part, based on numerical simulations. For each mould material, different cooling systems are evaluated based on the quality parameters and, when approved, the plastic part warpage is verified. The results presented comparatively reveal that the information obtained in these evaluations are fundamental to guide the design of cooling systems, especially in aluminium moulds. The results stand also as indicators of potential process optimization regarding manufacturing costs, cycle time and energy consumption.
Keywords
Numerical simulation, Cooling system, aluminium mould, Thermoplastic, injection moulding
