The cooling system of a plastic injection mould plays a significant role in determining the productivity and quality of the injection moulding process. In a previous research, a feature-based technique was developed that can generate automatically the preliminary design of the cooling system from a given plastic part. This paper reports a new method that can generate the layout design automatically from a preliminary design. The layout design process takes into account the functionality and manufacturability of the design. Given the preliminary design of a cooling system, candidate cooling circuits are generated by a specific graph traversal algorithm. Tentative manufacturing plans are then developed for the cooling circuits to assess the manufacturability. An experimental system is implemented to verify the feasibility of the method, and layout design examples generated by the system are given to demonstrate the method.
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