by Sarra Zoghlami
For mold designers aiming to extract cooling channels from their mold and perform thermal analysis.
Introduction
In SimForm, you can extract cooling channels directly from your molds, which are modeled as holes in your mold bodies. This eliminates the need to create explicit 3D bodies representing the cooling lines and optimizes the overall design process for increased modeling efficiency.
In this article, we show you how to define your cooling channels by using the face-based extraction procedure.
Content
To conduct a thermal analysis on your mold design with SimForm, you must define the different components of your mold. This enables the software to identify the mold components, plastic parts, and channels.
SimForm allows you to define the cooling channels in your mold using one of the following approaches:
- If your mold contains cooling channels with explicit physical bodies in CAD files, you can categorize them using the procedure described in Defining Cooling Channels in SimForm.
- If your mold does not contain cooling channels with physical bodies in CAD files, you can extract cooling channels directly from the mold using SimForm's face-based extraction feature.
This video shows an example of how to extract the cooling channels from a mold in SimForm:
Extract Cooling Channels from your Mold
Before defining the cooling channels, you must create a new project and a new job, upload your model CAD files and define the components and materials for your mold and plastic parts. For more information, see the procedure described in the Channel Planner Thermal Analysis article.
To extract cooling channels from your model, follow these steps:
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In the Channel panel, select Faces selection mode.
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Select the face of the mold that defines a cooling channel.
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In the Channel panel, click the + sign to extract the channel adjacent to the selected faces.
The software automatically extracts all the corresponding channel parts related to the chosen face.
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Click Display Channel to display and verify it. Then, right-click anywhere in the graphic window to reset the view.
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If some parts of the cooling channel are not extracted, for each part, click Pick channel face and select the face of the mold that defines the missing part to add it to the cooling channel.
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Repeat step 3 and 4 to extract all the channels in your model.
The extracted channels are listed in the Channels panel.
Detect Baffles Automatically is enabled by default, allowing SimForm to automatically identify the baffles and list the categorized baffles in the Channels panel.
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Enable the Inlet/outlet selection mode to define the inlets and outlets of the channels.
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For each cooling channel, click on the inlet face to designate it as an inlet.
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To define the outlet of the channel, press the Shift key while clicking on the corresponding face. SimForm allows using channels with one inlet and multiple outlets.
The surface defined as the inlet changes to purple, while the outlet surface changes to green. Channels with defined inlets and outlets are displayed in blue.
Conclusion
SimForm's features simplify the thermal analysis of your mold designs by eliminating the need to create physical bodies for cooling lines. With its automatic extraction and categorization capabilities for cooling channels, SimForm enables more efficient and accurate modeling, reducing the time and effort required for mold design. By integrating these tools into your design process, you can improve the quality of your molds and plastic parts while reducing costs and speeding up product development.