Abstract: A new geometry-based automatic interference checking method of injection mold cooling system is proposed. The centerlines of cooling circuit are extracted correctly by the core or cavity cooling system feature recognition. The central line of the cooling system loop is traversed to determine the spatial geometric position of any two section of the water center line in the loop of the cooling system. For these geometry relationships, different methods for calculating the minimum distance are summarized. According to the established allowable safe distance criterion of the cooling circuit, the interference detection of cooling circuit is implemented using the calculated minimum distance. The case study shows that this method is available to check interference of cooling system of injection mold efficiently, improve user productivity, reduce the error rate and realize the automation of interference checking of cooling system.

Key words: injection mold, cooling system, feature recognition, mathematic model, interference detection