Toward a Bottom-up Approach to Automate the Design of Cooling Systems for Injection Molding

Abstract

This paper presents a bottom-up approach to automate the generation of cooling systems for injection molding. The focus is set on layout design, as it is in this phase where the cooling concepts are generated. To do so, the layout design problem is decomposed in a top-down manner in both the functional domain and the physical domain. This results in a new problem formulation where elements at different abstraction levels are related by syntactic rules. Design solutions are generated by transforming lower abstraction levels into higher ones, which results in a bottom-up generation strategy. The results of implementing this method in SolidWorks^® and C#^® are presented as the method is being described.

Keywords:

• design automation
• injection molding
• cooling system