iCAT 2023 INVITED SPEAKERS

Abstract: Conformal cooling in injection molding of thermoplastics enabled by the additive manufacturing technology is a breakthrough solution to the problem of temperature control at critical locations in the mold. This paper discusses the design and manufacturing of a hybrid mold insert, focusing on evaluating the predictive quality of a simplified simulation model that does not require modeling of the hybrid mold and does not account for the different material properties of the mold components. The hybrid mold was fabricated in a two-step process. The lower part of the insert was fabricated by milling and the upper part of the insert, including the conformal cooling channels, was fabricated using the additive man-ufacturing technology of selective laser melting. The hybrid mold insert consists of two materials: maraging steel 1.2709 for the upper part of the mold insert and tool steel 1.2343 for all other parts of the mold. To validate the simulation results, experimental measurements were performed after ejection of the product during the injection molding process using a thermal imaging camera. It was confirmed that the simplified simulation model agrees well with the measurement results and that it can be used to simulate the injection molding process when a hybrid mold consists of materials with similar material properties.