Materials insight

Mold Tempering: Conformal Cooling - yes or no?

The tempering layout for injection molds is often designed departing from previous experiences. The manufacturing feasibility is the main driver when deciding where to place cooling lines. However, often the relevance of the tempering in the process profitability or in the part quality is underestimated, and due to the lack of better information sometimes the resulting tempering performs far from the optimum. As a consequence, the molding efficiency is reduced, the part quality is compromised and, once the mold is already built, sometimes expensive trial-and-error is required to bring the mold to an optimum configuration.

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Sigmasoft

SIGMA® Plastic Services, Inc. supplies the polymer simulation software SIGMASOFT®, provides support and training to SIGMASOFT® users, and offers engineering services using its proprietary software. SIGMASOFT® is a fully 3-D Navier-Stokes based plastic and elastomer simulation solver with an extremely user-friendly interface to comprehensively describe almost any polymer process. As a high-end tool it considers all parts of a mold, including cooling lines and heater elements etc., thereby eliminating the need to estimate boundary conditions. Highly complex parts with various wall thickness changes can be considered effortlessly, as the capabilities of this fully 3-D software go far beyond the ones of traditional 2 1/2-D tools. 

SIGMASOFT® is a modular software with four basic modules: thermoplastics, thermoset, elastomer, and MIM-CIM to simulate almost any polymer process. SIGMAlink can be used to transfer results to FEA tools.

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