Design Optimization of Plastic Injection Tooling for Additive Manufacturing

Abstract

This work presents a systematic and practical finite element based design optimization approach for the injection tooling adaptive to additive manufacturing (AM) technology using stereo-lithography (SLA) and powder bed fusion (PBF). First a thermomechanical optimization of conformal cooling is implemented to obtain the optimal parameters associated with conformal cooling design. Then, a multiscale thermomechanical topology optimization is implemented to obtain a lightweight lattice injection tooling without compromising the thermal and mechanical performance. The design approach is implemented to optimize a real design mold and the final optimal design is prototyped in SLA and the manufacturability in PBF has been discussed.