• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.9 no.6
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• pp.1754-1759
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• 2008

To produce plastic parts that have fine pattern through conventional injection molding, a lot of difficulties follow. Therefore, rapid heating and cooling methods are good candidates for manufacturing injection-molded parts with micro/nano patterns. In this study, we adopted the E-Mold patent technology. The mold for E-Mold technology has a separate heated core with micro heaters. It is very important to optimize the lay-out of the heaters in heated core because it influences both control and distribution of mold temperature. We developed a optimization method of heating line lay-out by using commercial softwares and compared the output with the experimental results. We used Pro-Engineer Wildfire 2.0 for the mold design, ICEMCFD for mesh generation, and FLUENT for heat transfer simulation. The simulation results showed the temperature profile from $60^{\circ}C$ to $120^{\circ}C$ or $180^{\circ}C$ during heating and cooling process which were compared with the injection molding experiments. We concluded that the simulation could well explain the experimental results. It was shown that the E-Mold optimization design for heater lay-out could be available through the simulation.