Geometry and cooling effects on an induction self-heating insert for rapid mold temperature control: Experimental, Multiphysics, and artificial neural network-based analysis.

Authors

Thanh Trung Do, Tran Minh The Uyen, Pham Son Minh

Published in

PloS one. Volume 21. Issue 10. Pages e0359849. Epub Oct 27, 2026.

Abstract

Control of mold-cavity surface temperature strongly affects filling, premature frozen-layer formation, and cycle time in thin-wall injection molding. This study evaluates an induction self-heating insert with a thin heating zone directly coupled to a cooling layer using experiments, a sequentially coupled electromagnetic-thermal model, and an Artificial Neural Network (ANN). The design space contains 25 Taguchi L25 geometries defined by T, W, and L; X and Y coordinates are added so that the ANN predicts the surface temperature field. Three cooling states are considered: No Water (NW), Stagnant Water (SW), and Flowing Water (FW). Experimental ANN targets are the mean of five repeated tests. The simulation reproduced the location of the hot zone; among four cases with reported quantitative differences, three differed by no more than about 10 °C and one showed a peak difference of about 20 °C. To prevent data leakage, all 846 points from each geometry were kept together during geometry-wise validation. The resulting R² values were 0.746, 0.653, and 0.493 for NW, SW, and FW, with Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) values of 17.03, 12.97, and 12.62 °C, respectively. The effects of T, W, and L depended on the cooling state and were not consistently monotonic. A proof-of-concept molding test showed complete filling of a Chip 2 part using Low-Density Polyethylene (LDPE); the mean spacing was 28.6 µm for a nominal 30 µm, and the mean height was 106.6 µm for a nominal 100 µm. These results show that combining insert geometry, cooling-water state, and a surrogate model can support local thermal design, delay frozen-layer formation, and improve filling in injection molding.

PMID:
42945195
Bibliographic data and abstract were imported from PubMed on 28 Oct 2026.

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