Abstract
The conformal cooling channel is increasingly favored by mold enterprises for its excellent cooling effect, and more and more designers are using conformal cooling channel in mold design cases. Among numerous cooling channel structures, spiral cooling channel is a very typical and widely used channel structure. Due to its free and flexible spiral shape, designing this channel is not an easy task. For a long time, designers can only rely on basic modeling tools to complete design work through a large number of interactive operations, which often requires a lot of time and effort. Inspired by the spring structure, this paper proposes an automatic generation method for spiral cooling channel. Its basic idea is to first project the spiral line onto the offset surface of the mold surface through the projection curve method, thereby obtaining the initial trajectory line. Then, control points are generated on the initial trajectory line, and finally, spline curves are used to string all control points together to form a scanning trajectory line, and scan along the scanning trajectory line with the specified cross-section to form a cooling channel. Experimental results show that this method is simple and practical, and can quickly generate spiral cooling channels that meet the requirements, greatly saving design time, reducing design errors, and improving design efficiency.