EOS releases tooling whitepaper

Study verifies time and cost savings from optimized, laser-sintered heat/cooling channels.

Krailling - EOS GmbH Electro Optical Systems, the world-leading manufacturer of laser-sintering systems, today announces the release of a recent whitepaper examining the benefits of using direct metal laser-sintering (DMLS) to create tooling inserts. Titled “Optimised Mould temperature control procedure using DMLS,” the study combines descriptions of moulding innovations with documented field results—time, cost savings and quality increases—taken from injection-moulding projects that use tooling manufactured with DMLS.

The whitepaper was written by Siegfried Mayer, application engineer, who has more than 14 years of experience in the tooling sector and is responsible at EOS for tooling and moulding customers.

“We have been refining DMLS toolmaking techniques and materials since 1995,” says Augustin Niavas, Business development manager Tooling. “Our technology offerings have proven their benefits to the tooling and mouldmaking markets, particularly in injection moulding.”

“Our laser-sintered mould inserts can drop cycle times in injection moulding by up to 60 percent,” says Ralph Mayer, managing director of LaserBearbeitungsCenter (LBC) in Kornwestheim, Germany. LBC, a service provider with long years of experience in tooling has two EOS DMLS systems M 270 in operation, successfully cooperating with mid-sized and large-scale industry clients on tooling projects. Mayer adds: “Another important benefit of DMLS in injection moulding is also to cut scrap rates. In some cases from 50 percent to zero.”

The Conformal Cooling Advantage

Cooling time can account for up to 70 percent of injection moulding cycle times. Traditional methods of creating heating/cooling channels in moulds involve straight-line drilling, which is limited in its ability to develop channels that reach critical hot spots. DMLS enables built-in, conformal cooling channels that can be optimized to draw off heat more rapidly and more evenly, dramatically reducing cycle time and increasing part quality by eliminating warpage and other defects.

Cool Case Studies

Here are some of the results already obtained by using DMLS to create injection moulds and mould inserts with conformal cooling:

* 20 percent increase in mould productivity and a 50-hour toolmaking time for a blow-mold (Es-Tec)
* Reduced cycle times from 15 to 9 seconds, enabling a 75 percent increase in productivity on a 4-bottle blow mold with DMLS inserts (SIG Blowtec)
* Reduced cycle time by two-thirds using a DMLS designed core effectively cooling down a critical hot spot (LaserBearbeitungsCenter)

Other advantages of using DMLS in toolmaking include the ability to rapidly make moulding inserts with complex geometries; to build tooling inserts on top of a preformed component (hybrid approach); to induce and control heat/cooling fluid turbulence for optimized heat transfer; and to provide heating channels to maintain a uniform mould temperature. Today, with tool inserts manufactured with DMLS millions of injection-molded plastic products and thousands of metal parts in die casting are produced.