Optimal design of medium channels for water-assisted rapid thermal cycle mold using multi-objective evolutionary algorithm and multi-attribute decision-making method

Rapid heat cycle molding technology developed recently is a novel polymer injection molding process. In this study, a new water-assisted rapid heat cycle molding (WRHCM) mold used for producing a large-size air-conditioning plastic panel was investigated. Aiming at improving heating efficiency and temperature distribution uniformity of the mold cavity surface, a two-stage optimization approach was proposed to determine the optimal design parameters of medium channels for the WRHCM mold. First of all, the non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm-II (NSGA-II) combined with surrogate models was employed to search the Pareto-optimal solutions. Subsequently, the Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution was adopted as a multi-attribute decision-making method to determine the best compromise solution from the Pareto set. Then, the layout of the medium channels for this air-conditioning panel WRHCM mold was optimized based on the developed optimization method. It was indicated that the heating efficiency and temperature distribution uniformity on the mold cavity surface were greatly improved by using the optimal design results. Furthermore, the effectiveness of the optimization method proposed in this study was validated by an industrial application.