Optimized Design of Thermofluid Systems Using the Example of Mold Cooling in Injection Molding

For many industrial applications, the heating and cooling of fluids is an essential aspect. Systems used for this purpose can be summarized under the general term ‘thermofluid systems’. As an application, we investigate industrial process cooling systems that are used, among other things, for mold cooling in injection molding. The systems considered in this work consist of interconnected individual air-cooled chillers and injection molds which act as ideal heat sources. In practice, some parts of the system are typically fixed while some components and their connections are optional and thus allow a certain degree of freedom for the design. Therefore, our goal is to find a favorable system design and operation regarding a set of a-priori known load scenarios. In this context, a favorable system is one which is able to satisfy the demand in all load scenarios and has comparatively low total costs. Hence, an optimization problem arises which can be modeled using mixed integer non-linear programming. The non-linearity is induced both by the component behavior as well as by the general physical system behavior. As a proof of concept and to complete our work, we then conduct a small case study which illustrates the potential of our approach.