Why variotherm technology is used in injection molding?
Many mold designers and manufacturers faced with polymer injection molding problems, such as weld lines, flow marks, sink marks, exposed fibers and poor surface transcription of parts. Increasing mold temperature is the conventional way to solve these molding problems. However, with the increase in the mold temperature, the cycle time will also increase significantly.
Therefore, the Rapid Heat Cycle Molding process is introduced to improve the part quality within a reasonable cycle time. The variotherm process is to raise the mold temperature during filling phase, and rapidly cool the mold at the end of filling. Thus, the weld lines of molded parts could form at high temperature, and the fact that the cooling process starts at a lower temperature could shorten the required cycle time. Due to its excellent balance in product performance and production cost, variotherm has gained a lot of attentions in plastic injection molding industry recently.
Challenges
- To optimize the heat and cool switching timing.
- To determine how much power is required to heat up the mold and how much flow rate of coolant is needed to cool down the mold in varioterm process.
- To maximum the endurance of the mold under such large temperature variation range.
What Can Moldex3D Do?
To satisfy the needs of CAE analysis for variotherm molding process, Moldex3D provides comprehensive tools to simulate various rapid heating and cooling molding conditions, integrating fully transient true 3D numerical approach by considering the interplay between filling, packing and cooling stages.
- Determines parameters, such as cooling system, heating system, mold temperature, cooling time, etc.
- Visualizes the temperature distribution and variation over time on mold surfaces and any cross-section.
- Solves part filling and packing issues with rapid temperature variations.
- Simulates coolant network efficiency and identify potential problems.
- Improves weld lines, flow marks, shrinkage, flatness, etc.