THREE-DIMENSIONAL TRANSIENT MOLD COOLING ANALYSIS BASED ON GALERKIN FINITE ELEMENT FORMULATION WITH A MATRIX-FREE CONJUGATE GRADIENT TECHNIQUE

A methodology is presented to simulate the three-dimensional heat transfer within a mold during the injection molding process. The mold cooling analysis assists cooling channel design and paves the way for part shrinkage and warpage analysis. The transient temperature distributions in the mold and the polymer part are simultaneously computed by Galerkin Finite Element Method (GFEM) using a matrix-free Jacobi Conjugate Gradient (JCG) scheme. The numerical method presented here is efficient and has shown to require a fraction of the memory and computing time required by conventional methods. The matrix-free algorithm is initially validated using an injection mold designed to produce a plaque with a molded-in hole. Subsequently, the method is further applied to a representative automotive plastic component.