Study of the wear behaviour of conventional and rapid tooling mould materials

Conventional thinking let European mould makers choose for a standard, well-established strategy: make the mould the hardest possible. In our actual global economy however, the price/performance ratio has become essential to keep a place in this increasingly competitive market, especially in the case of smaller batch sizes. This paper studies the influence of tool manufacturing method and tool materials on tool wear and tool life in plastic injection. A product with several wear sensitive elements was developed to be moulded with a glass filled polymer (PA6 GF30). An exhaustive dimensional inspection program was set up to monitor the wear resistance. The test mould contained 4 inserts made in different materials and by different production techniques. Two inserts were produced by rapid tooling techniques: one was selective laser sintered[3],[4] from Laserform ST-100 polymer coated steel powder[5] (3D-systems), the other was produced by direct laser melting[6] in Directsteel 20V1 (EOS). The two other inserts were produced conventionally by milling in tool steel 1.2312 and aluminium. The result of the wear test showed a clearly different behaviour of the materials with a remarkable wear resistance ranking