Determination of Thermal Contact Conductance of an Injection Mold Assembly for the Prediction of Mold Surface Temperature

Injection molds are fabricated by assembling a number of plates in which mold core and cavity components are inserted. The assembled structure causes a number of contact interfaces between each component where the heat transfer is affected by the thermal contact resistance. However, the mold assembly has been treated as a one body in numerical analyses of injection molding, which has a limitation in predicting the mold temperature distribution during the molding cycle. In this study, a numerical approach that considers the thermal contact effect is proposed to predict the heat transfer characteristics of an injection mold assembly. To find the thermal contact conductance between the mold core and plate, a number of finite element (FE) simulations were performed with the design of experiment (DOE) and statistical analysis. Thus, the heat transfer analyses using the obtained conductance values can provide more reliable results than conventional one-body simulations.