Recognition and simplification of holes in CAD models of an injection mold for mold flow analysis

In mold flow analysis, a mold base is usually modeled as a rectangular box to simplify the mold structure. However, in order to improve the accuracy of the analysis, the real, non-simplified model base must be considered in some applications. There are usually a large number of holes in an injection mold, and most of them pass through multiple plates. To convert the CAD models of an injection mold into solid meshes, some of the holes in the mold set need to be simplified. The purpose of this study is to recognize and simplify unnecessary holes in an injection mold for mold flow analyses. It is primarily divided into four steps: (1) hole recognition on each CAD model, including single and ladder holes, (2) recognition of related holes passing across different CAD models, (3) detection of holes that should be preserved, and (4) simplification of unnecessary holes. Three injection molds were used to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed method.