Milacron's DME announces partnership with Linear AMS to provide conformal cooling solutions

Milacron Holdings Corp. announced that its DME product brand has partnered with Linear AMS (a Moog Company) to offer metal 3D printed Conformal Cooling products to help improve productivity in the molding industry.

TruCoolTM is the new DME line of products designed to help moldmakers and molders with their mold cooling. DME’s Conformal Cooling solutions utilize a cutting edge, direct metal laser melting 3D printing process to produce highly complex cavities, cores, and components with conformal cooling channels. The process achieves shapes, paths, and channel geometries impossible to obtain with conventional tooling. “We build the unmachineable!” said David Baucus, DME Product Manager. Baucus also added, “The Conformal Cooling solution places cooling channels at the optimal distance from the mold surface, consistently following the geometric shape of any mold insert for any customer part, allowing the mold to maintain a targeted, consistent temperature that allows for complete thermal control with cooling times reduced up to 100 percent. This technology also allows for conformal venting solutions for those hard to reach areas of trapped gases, when requested by the molder.”

The DME TruCoolTM Conformal Cooling solution starts with a detailed review of the moldmakers and/or molders’ requirements and with the use of advanced 3D CAD modeling and F.E.A. software the DME technology team can simulate the most life like and optimized cooling channels. The result allows for complex cooling channels with greater overall coverage, even distribution of cooling and the ability to provide individual insert temperature control.

The DME/Linear AMS process uses advanced Direct Metal Laser Melting (DMLM) technology, which is extremely dense and stronger when compared to direct metal laser sintering (DMLS.) This allows for lighter weight solutions with improved performance characteristics to create complex shapes and improved reliability.

The moldmaker receives their Conformal Cooling (and/or venting) optimized mold cavity or core according to the specification of their 3D model with a hardness up to 56HRC with an additional +.025” rough metal to allow them to finish the cavity or core’s part surface to their own specifications. Every Conformal Cooling solution is material, flow and pressure tested to ensure quality, each time, before shipment.

With DME’s TruCoolTM Conformal Cooling solutions, molders will benefit from significant cycle time reduction, complete and isolated thermal control, significant quality improvements, less scrap, increased flexibility in waterline designs and the ability to visualize flow capabilities and thermal properties.

“Conventional mold cooling has remained largely unchanged for decades. DME’s partnership with Linear AMS is a huge step forward for the industry”, said Peter Smith, DME President. Smith added, “Our real world, in-field results show a significantly reduced total cycle time – between 15 and 60 percent depending on part complexity, shortening the time needed to run the part and improving part quality. That’s a significant cost savings every molder would be interested in. Likewise, OEM/product designers will benefit from the technology as it broadens the scope of part design allowing for advancements in plastic part production and application use”.

A pioneer in metal additive manufacturing, Linear AMS has 12+ years in building 3D-printed conformal cooling inserts. “We’ve taken the lessons from over a decade of building DMLM parts and established design rules and process controls that enable us to make excellent quality components that meet or exceed customer expectations,” says David Hodge, Linear AMS Vice President. “We are excited to partner with DME, a leader in the molding industry, who shares our focus for serving customers with superior products. When a customer is molding millions of parts, seeing significant process gains is a real eye-opener.”

In 2017, the DME brand celebrates its 75-year anniversary. Look for more new and innovative products this year as DME continues to be the mold technology supply leader and pioneer of new and innovative solutions.