moulds | Additive manufacturing
Above: Czech mould maker Innomia developed this complex cooled insert for
Magna, cutting cycle time by 17
assistant to the senior management at Bergmann. “This means that we are already able to achieve
considerable reductions of up to 20% in cycle times. Moreover, as additive manufacturing enables conformal cooling of tool cores we can implement a 50% increase in the quality of the tool produced.” Bergman, which supplies injection moulded parts
Right: An additive
manufactured mould core
produced by Innomia for Magna before removal from the machine build platform
and tools to a range of end use industries including automotive, construction and medical, will use additive manufacturing technology to produce complex geom- etries and conformal cooling components. It expects most of its production to be in the EOS Maraging Steel MS1 powder material and Gerber estimates around 50% of the machine’s workload will be component designs it could not produce using its conventional machining technologies. The India-based production division of Salcomp, a Finnish supplier of plugs and connectors for smart- phones, used EOS technology to convert to conformal cooled cores on a mould used to manufacture mobile phone charger plugs. The move allowed the company to reduce the cooling time from 14s to 8s while reducing reject rates from 2.0% to 1.4%, which it says equates to an extra 56,000 units each month. “Our core inserts, produced using additive
manufacturing technology, are achieving the benefits that we were looking for,” says Salcomp sourcing specialist Arumugam Narayanaswami. “We were able to shorten the production cycle while simultaneously improving quality. The reduced costs combined with the increased rate of production have shown that technology is not simply self-serving but also has a positive impact on our business”, says Arumugam Narayanaswami, responsible for sourcing at Salcomp. EOS hardware was also used by Czech mouldmaker Innomia to produce a conformal cooled core for an
50 INJECTION WORLD | June 2014
www.injectionworld.com
automotive trim component produced locally by Magna. Space restricted cooling to one side of the core in the original tooling design. Despite manufacturing the core in a high conductivity beryllium copper alloy, Magna had to run the mould cooling system at 16˚C to achieve an acceptable cycle time, giving rise to condensation issues and wear problems as a result of the regular cleaning required to remove corrosion. Innomia developed replacement cores with an optimised conformal network of 3mm diameter cooling channels that were produced by additive manufacturing techniques on an Eosint M270 machine using EOS’s Maraging Steel 1.2709 post hardened to 50Rc. The optimised cooling circuits meant cycle times could be reduced by 17% even when running the mould tem- perature cooling circuits as high as 90˚C. Magna reports a cost saving over the first 370,000
cycles of around €20,000 and the company’s head of tool maintenance Pavel Strandek says the additive manufacturing technology resolved a long standing problem. “We knew how an improved product would have to look, but manufacturing it just wasn’t possible. Additive manufacturing allowed us to make the breakthrough,” he says. “We were able to plan the cooling channels just as
we wanted them and then manufacture the mold core correspondingly… the result has convinced us at every level: maintenance, quality of the end product, costs, heat dissipation,” says Strandek.
Click on the links for more information: ❙
www.hrsflow.com ❙
www.texerdesign.it ❙
www.poleplasturgie.net ❙
www.eos.info ❙
www.spritzguss-bergmann.de ❙
www.innomia.cz
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