Multi-Cavity, Family Moulds, and Conformal Cooling: Where Cimatron Mold Design Earns Its Keep

Designing a simple 2-plate mold for a basic part is very different than designing a 16-cavity family mold with side actions and a conformal cooling circuit. The first job can be done in just about any CAD tool. The second one is going to test you — and the software you’re using.

Cimatron Mold Design was created for the complex jobs. From a practical point of view, here are three areas where it earns a place in a serious toolroom.

Multi-Cavity Molds: Finding the Right Balance
Multi-cavity molds are common in high volume production – you’re making 4, 8, 16 or more identical parts in a single shot cycle. The trick is to get each cavity to fill consistently so that all of the parts come out the same size and with the same finish.

Cimatron is very good at handling the geometry of multi-cavity layouts. If you change one cavity, the software helps you propagate those changes through all cavities in the mold — something that can become dangerously error-prone when done manually, especially late in the project when revisions are flying in.

Family Molds One tool, different parts
Family molds make different parts in the same shot, e.g. a left and right bracket that will be assembled together. The design challenge is to balance fill, cooling and ejection for parts with different geometries that share the same mold base.

This is where a general purpose CAD tool begins to falter. The toolroom has to handle:
• Same mold, different core and cavity geometries

• Common cooling channels in case of multi-cavity shapes
  • Flow gate and runner systems for various part volumes
  • Part-specific ejector pin configurations

  This is done in Cimatron’s mold specific environment. This allows designers to work on each cavity separately but still see the entire mold assembly, minimizing the chance of finding interference problems too late.

  Conformal Cooling: The Revolutionary Design Challenge
  Generally, toolrooms prefer standard straight-drilled cooling channels, as they are easier to manufacture. But for complex part geometries, straight channels leave hot spots, areas where the part takes longer to cool, resulting in longer cycle times and potential warpage.

  Conformal cooling channels follow the contour of the part surface to maintain a more even temperature throughout the cavity. They are becoming more popular and are more feasible to produce due to additive manufacturing. The challenge in the design is that conformal channels are complex 3D geometry that has to coexist with all other features in the mold,

  Cimatron Mold Design supports conformal cooling design in the same environment where you are doing all of your other mold work. No need to export geometry to another tool, design your cooling circuits, and then try to import them back, a process that is often error-prone and time consuming.

  Where This Really Saves Money
  You’ll usually see the business case for specialist mold design software such as Cimatron in these quantifiable results:

  1. Less interference problems when steel is cut – caught on screen instead
  2. Shorter design cycles for complex mold types, which previously extended timelines
  3. Less re-work when cooling design does not work with ejection layout
  4. Designers get faster at quoting as they feel more confident estimating complexity

  Putting It All Together
  Multi cavity, family and conformal cooling molds are not exotic – they’re the daily reality for toolrooms servicing automotive, electronics, medical and consumer goods markets. Your tools should reflect that reality.

  Cimatron Mold Design doesn’t make hard jobs easy but it does make them faster, more manageable and less likely to produce expensive surprises. That is what specialist software is supposed to do.

  Cimatron is the right fit for their mix of work. PELF Engineering helps toolrooms find out if Contact us to set up a chat with a member of our technical team.