Conformal cooling through thin shell moulds produced by 3D printing

摘要

In today's competitive mould industry, a product's time-to-market plays an important role in the success of a company by producing quality moulds. For many years mould designers struggled for the improvement of the cooling system performance, due the fact that the cooling system complexity is physically limited by the fabrication capability of the conventional tooling methods. Even conventional cooling performance may not meet the expectations of the mould engineer to maintain uniform mould temperature. Proper thermal control is useful not only for cooling purposes, but also for the preservation of mould heat to increase the part quality and production rate. Conformal cooling is an emerging methodology to control more accurately the temperature of the mould cavity throughout the process. Controlling of the temperature in thin shell moulds is a challenging task, and if successful, will pave way towards increased part quality and production rate. This paper presents the results of experimental investigations carried out casting aluminium in thin shell moulds produced by three-dimensional (3D) printing with and without conformal cooling channels. The freedom to create the internal geometry by the use of the 3D printing process allows for the fabrication of moulds with complex internal cooling passages compared to other rapid prototyping processes.