Construction of conformal cooling channels for injection mold designs

A system comprising:

• a processor;
• and
• a non-transitory machine-readable medium comprising instructions that, when executed by the processor, cause a computing system to:
• construct conformal cooling channels for the injection mold design, including by:
• extracting a cooling surface of the injection mold design, wherein the cooling surface corresponds to specified portions of the injection mold design to be cooled through the conformal cooling channels;
• generating a central offset surface positioned at a central offset distance from the cooling surface;
• projecting cooling lines on to the central offset surface;
• detecting sharp portions of the projected cooling lines based on sharpness criteria;
• smoothing the detected sharp portions of the projected cooling lines to form smoothed cooling lines;
• and
• generating the conformal cooling channels using the smoothed cooling lines along the central offset surface as a center line for the conformal cooling channels;
• and
• provide the injection mold design that includes the constructed conformal cooling channels for physical manufacture to physically manufacture the injection mold design through an additive manufacturing process.

A non-transitory machine-readable medium comprising instructions that, when executed by a processor, cause a computing system to:

• access an injection mold design;
• construct conformal cooling channels for the injection mold design, including by:
• extracting a cooling surface of the injection mold design, wherein the cooling surface corresponds to specified portions of the injection mold design to be cooled through the conformal cooling channels;
• generating a central offset surface positioned at a central offset distance from the cooling surface;
• projecting cooling lines on to the central offset surface;
• detecting sharp portions of the projected cooling lines based on sharpness criteria;
• smoothing the detected sharp portions of the projected cooling lines to form smoothed cooling lines;
• and
• generating the conformal cooling channels using the smoothed cooling lines along the central offset surface as a center line for the conformal cooling channels;
• and
• provide the injection mold design that includes the constructed conformal cooling channels for physical manufacture to physically manufacture the injection mold design through an additive manufacturing process.