Automatic design of conformal cooling circuits for rapid tooling

This paper presents an automatic method for designing conformal cooling circuit, which is an essential component that directly affects the quality and timing for the products fabricated by rapid tooling. To reduce the time of cooling and control the uniformity of temperature and volumetric shrinkage, industry expects to have cooling channels that are conformal to the shape of products. We achieve the goal of automatically designing such conformal cooling circuit in twofold. First, the relationship between the conformal cooling and the geometry shape of cooling circuit is formulated. Based on that, we investigate a geometric modeling algorithm to design the cooling circuit approaching the conformal cooling. Simulations have been taken to verify the advantage of the cooling circuit generated by our algorithm.