ANALYSIS AND VALIDATION OF MOLD DESIGN GUIDELINES FOR COOLING TIME AND RUNNER SIZING

摘要

Injection molds have been designed over the years using "rules of thumb" which have become almost standard guidelines in industry practice. This paper analyzes and validates two common guidelines for 1) estimation of cooling time and 2) determination of runner sizing. The common guideline for cooling time estimation is compared to the analytical solution of the heat equation and found to have a small average error but significance variance across material properties and processing conditions, and validated against industry data. A common guideline for runner system design was found to provide very good results compared with optimal designs produced with the Hagen-Pouiselle flow equations.