A study on the development of injection mould with a high productivity using hybrid rapid manufacturing technologies

Hybrid 쾌속생산공정을 이용한 고생산성 사출성형 금형 개발에 관한 연구

In recent, rapid manufacturing (RM) technology is widely used to develop an injection mould with a high performance. The objective of this paper is to develop the injection mould with a high productivity using a hybrid RM technology combining Laser-aided Direct Metal Tooling process with a machining process. The geometry decomposition has been utilized to improve the speed of the manufacturing for the mould. Mould with conformal cooling channels has been designed to improve cooling characteristics. Several experiments have been carried out to evaluate characteristics of the mould manufactured from the hybrid RM technology. In addition, injection molding tests have been performed to examine the performance of the manufactured mould. The results of the injection molding tests have been shown that a cooling time and the injection time of the designed mould are reduced to one-fifth and one-second that of the mould with convention cooling channels.