Cooling Performance of an Additively Manufactured Lattice Structural Conformal Cooling Channel for Hot Stamping

Abstract

The design principle of an additively manufactured (AMed) lattice structural conformal cooling channel for hot stamping is investigated. AM with selective laser melting is adopted to fabricate a lab-scale rapid cooling die flled with conformal lattice structures, which provide structural stifness, act as thermal fns, and expedite the occurrence of turbulent fow in the channel. Three diferent surface area densities with the same relative volume density were considered to evaluate the heat transfer and cooling performance. Computational fuid dynamics is used to analyze the fow of coolant in the lattice structures with diferent surface area densities. The experimental and computational results show that if the surface density of the lattice structure is selected properly, the cooling performance can be enhanced signifcantly while maintaining a constant relative volume density, which directly afects the weight reduction and stifness of the cooling die.