A Holistic Approach to Cooling System Selection and Injection Molding Process Optimization Based on Non-Dominated Sorting

This study applied a holistic approach to the problem of controlling the temperature of critical areas of tools using conformal cooling. The entire injection molding process is evaluated at the tool design stage using four criteria, one from each stage of the process cycle, to produce a tool with effective cooling that enables short cycle times and ensures good product quality. Tool manufacturing time and cost, as well as tool life, are considered in the optimization by introducing a novel tool-efficiency index. The multi-objective optimization is based on numerical simulations. The simulation results show that conformal cooling effectively cools the critical area of the tool and provides the shortest cycle times and the lowest warpage, but this comes with a trade-off in the tool-efficiency index. By using the tool-efficiency index with non-dominated sorting, the number of relevant simulation cases could be reduced to six, which greatly simplifies the decision regarding the choice of cooling system and process parameters. Based on the study, a tool with conformal cooling channels was made, and a coolant inlet temperature of 20 °C and a flow rate of 5 L/min for conformal and 7.5–9.5 L/min for conventional cooling channels were selected for production. The simulation results were validated by experimental measurements.