Abstract During an injection moulding process, it is very diffi-cult to achieve efficient and balanced cooling. It is also difficultto generate an optimal cooling design for industrial parts automatically.In this paper, a milled groove insert method in mouldcooling was proposed for cooling of medium and large plasticparts. The advantages of this method include a better cooling effect,ease and flexibility of design, characteristics of auto-designand considerable savings on the coolant flow rate. A household
iron part was studied and the assemblies were modelled. Thecooling analyses of the mould assembly and thermal stress analysisof plastic parts were performed using ABAQUS/Standardto compare the proposed method to the most popular straightdrilledcooling channel method. The thermal stress analysis wasrun, consequently, based on the result of the cooling analysis.Simulation results have confirmed the merits of the milledgroove insert method.
Keywords Cooling · Finite element method · Injection mouldcooling · Injection moulding · Milled groove insert method · Thermal stresses