Construction of Pre‐Deformed Shapes for Rapid Tooling in Injection Molding

The major issues in the development of injection molding technology include the progress in CAE and the developments in tool design methodology such as rapid tooling. The applicability of rapid tooling in injection molding was examined using unbalanced cooling to analyze the warpage and shrinkage. Moldflow Plastics Insight simulation software was used for the deformation calculations with different mold thermal conductivities. It can be concluded that the decreasing mold thermal conductivity will dramatically increase the volumetric shrinkage and the warpage as well. Because of these effects, it is of fundamental importance to compensate for the shrinkage and warpage, so in the paper a new design methodology is suggested for rapid tooling, which is based on the pre‐deformed model.