Automatic initial design of injection mould

Abstract

An injection mould is a key mechanical system for injection moulding. The early design stages, such as selecting a suitable moulding machine, arranging cavity layout, designing the feed system and selecting the mould base, are classified as the initial design of an injection mould. This initial design can not only be used as a guide tool of the quotation of a mould and its detailed design later, but also serves as a communication bridge between the product design engineers and mould design engineers. This paper discusses the algorithms for the automatic initial design of an injection mould. To implement the automatic arrangement of the cavity layout, a feature box that records gate information and the geometric features of the product is designed. The proposed algorithms have been implemented in the IMOLD system developed at the National University of Singapore.