Injection molding overview
Use SimForm to perform a thermal cooling analysis for your plastic injection mold designs. These analyses help you identify hot spots on the plastic part and develop cooling layouts to improve the part quality and reduce cycle times.
You can perform mold cooling analysis using different types of projects.
Design project
You can use the design project type to run thermal analyses and iterate on preliminary cooling designs, including conventional and conformal cooling channels. You can also analyze and verify a complete mold design, predicting both part and mold temperatures and safe ejection times. This helps you optimize cooling channels and insert placement to enhance mold efficiency.
The following figures show a comparison of the temperature distribution using different cooling methods in a design project.
| Conventional cooling | Conformal cooling |
|---|---|
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You can run thermal simulations at different stages of the mold design process using:
- The basic mold feature that generates a rectangular mold around your plastic part to identify the hot areas in your plastic part that require cooling during the initial design phase, before designing the mold.
- A mold without cooling channels to identify high-temperature areas and critical components that need efficient cooling. This allows you to make well-informed decisions about the location for cooling channels and mechanisms like ejector pins and sliders in the mold.
- A mold with conventional cooling channels, including baffles and bubblers to reach areas of the plastic part which cannot be cooled effectively with straight cooling channels.
- A mold with conformal cooling channels that follow complex shapes of plastic parts to determine whether the added cost yields a more efficient mold.
Feasibility project
You can use the feasibility project type as a design-for-manufacturing (DFM) tool for your plastic part. You only need the CAD model of the plastic part.
You can run feasibility analyses for your plastic part design to:
- Predict hot spots and identify critical areas needing focused cooling.
- Estimate achievable cooling times before the mold is designed.
- Identify areas for design improvement to optimize manufacturing efficiency and improve part quality.
- Test different plastic part materials to quantify their impact on production cost.
Optimizing mold material
Both design project and feasibility project allow you to test various materials for both the mold and plastic parts to optimize performance and reduce production costs. You can choose materials from a list of widely used materials for plastic injection molds and plastic parts, or define new materials to meet the specific needs of any plastic molding project.