Design sensitivities of mold-cooling CAE software: an experimental verification

For design, optimization, and process-engineering applications of mold-cooling computer-aided engineering (CAE) technology, it is important that the software is sensitive to changes in cooling channel design for different materials and process conditions. In the present work, an attempt has been made to perform a detailed and rigorous verification to check for these design sensitivities from the CAE analysis. For four design and polymer material combinations, both molding and simulation trials were performed. C-COOL v. 3.0 mold cooling simulation software was used for the simulation trials. For each of these trials, measurements were taken for part planar-surface temperature distributions using infrared thermography, and for mold-wall temperatures at specific locations in the cavity using thermocouples. These experimental data have been compared with the predicted values and a favorable agreement has been observed for sensitivities most critical for design purposes.