Cooling analysis

The temperature field calculated by the cooling analysis, while of interest in its own right, may also be used as a boimdary condition for the flow analysis. That is, the cooling analysis is used to define the mold temperature for the flow analysis. This type of coupling between flow and cooling analysis most accurately describes the real process. 

TABLE 11.4 Data Needed for Injection-Molding Simulation—Advanced Mold Filling, Packing, and Cooling Analysis of Thermoplastics and Thermoplastic Elastomers ... 

Here —k dT/dx ) is the heat flux, h is the heat transfer coefficient (Delaunay et al. 2000a), T and are the mold wall temperatures at the two opposite sides of the cavity. The mold wall temperature should be calculated from the mold cooling analysis (see Chap. 7). 

In Eq. 7.2, q is the heat flux across the melt and mold interface, which is not known beforehand. The mold cooling analysis is essentially coupled with the transient heat transfer in the polymer melt during filling, packing, and cooling stages. 

The mold cooling analysis and the flow analysis are essentially coupled since the transient cavity wall temperature and heat flux are unknown in both analysis, although in practice one may only need a couple of iterative loops, depending on the required accuracy and efficiency. 

This Chapter will discuss the flow analysis, stractural analysis and the mold cooling analysis in sequence. 

Boundary Element Method for Mold Cooling Analysis... 

Numerical results of mold cooling analysis using a similar method were also presented by Chen and Chung (1994). 

Another alternative BIE that can be applied to mold cooling analysis is to use time-dependent fundamental solutions (e.g., Qiao 2005). The boundary integral equation can be written as... 

As has been mentioned in Sect. 7.3, the continuous injection-molding operation results in a cyclic heat transfer behavior in the mold, after a short transient period. The cycle-averaged temperature can be represented by a steady state heat conduction equation, i.e., Eq. 7.10. The mold cooling analysis can be greatly simplihed by solving the steady state problem. The boundary integral equation of ( 7.10) is... 

Two major types of analyses are discussed below— flow analysis and cooling analysis. It is important to review the literature, as more and more products are being introduced to serve the needs of the molding industry each year. The use of these CAE tools will assure that mold design and part processing can be accomplished with the greatest possible speed and effectiveness [11,12]. 

Figure 10-23. A mold-cooling analysis diagram used in a CAD system—the Moldcool program by Moldflow Australia Pty., Ltd.

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