Every year, companies around the world unknowingly lose hundreds of thousands of Euros due to the gradual decline in cooling efficiency in their tools and machines. Lower mold efficiency, longer cycle time due necessity of counteracting dimensional deviations of plastic parts, longer mold downtimes, maintenance and servicing – all these factors increase operating costs and translate into a decrease in company profits. The source of these problems originates not only in the quality of the cooling water, but also in the processing temperatures, which translate into precipitation and gradual deposition of deposits and rust inside cooling channels of molds as well as other heat exchangers.
The rate at which mineral deposits or corrosion byproducts are deposited depends on many factors, such as the chemical composition of the cooling medium and the operating temperature. Also, the way the cooling is designed can have a significant impact on the decrease in cooling efficiency. “Dead” areas that generate zero flows will be places where the deposits precipitated from the cooling medium will naturally settle. It is important to simulate the flow of the medium at the design stage of the mold cooling, so as to avoid fundamental errors that increase the risk of a drop in cooling performance. Unfortunately, at the stage of constructing the mold, the topic of the decrease in cooling efficiency due to calcification of the system seems so distant that it is rarely taken into account.