• Journal of the Korean Society for Precision Engineering
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• v.29 no.8
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• pp.824-833
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• 2012

The shrinkage and the warpage of the moulded part are influenced by the design of the product and injection mould. In a flat part with a partly thick volume, the warpage of the flat part is created from the difference of the shrinkage between thin and thick regions. The warpage of the flat part with a partly thick volume can be reduced by a proper design of the cooling system in the injection mould. The goal of this paper is to design properly cooling channels of injection mould to manufacture a flat part with a partly thick volume. The conformal cooling channel is adopted to improve cooling characteristics of a region with the thick volume. The linear cooling channels are assigned to the other region. The proper design of the conformal cooling channels is obtained from three-dimensional injection molding analysis for various design alternatives. The moulding characteristics of the designed mould with both conformal and linear cooling channels are compared to those of the mould with linear cooling channels from viewpoints of temperature, shrinkage and warpage of the moulded part using numerical analysis. Injection mould with both conformal and linear cooling channels for the flat part with a partially thick volume is fabricated. In addition, injection moulding experiments are performed using the fabricated mould. From the results of the injection moulding experiments, it has been shown that the designed mould can successfully fabricate the flat part with a partially thick volume.