Electrical Heated Epoxy Tool for Rotational Moulding Application

The conventional method of making rotational moulding part is by heating the cast aluminium mould or sheet metal mould by hot air medium which has its own limitation on energy loss, the other means is by direct heating and cooling of mould by passing hot oil/water in the mould to have better energy efficiency but leakage and safety problems associated with pumping pressurized hot oil/water. There is no solution available for prototyping rotational moulding parts using design intended material. The current practice of prototyping with the conventional method is expensive and time-consuming. In this work, a simple method is presented to produce a rotational moulded part with a breakthrough in-mould construction, which is Composite Mould Technology (CMT) with glass fibre reinforced epoxy resin built-in with electrical heaters. The project focuses were on proving CMT in comparison with the current production method. CMT reduce the cost by 90% and time to build Protomould by 85%. This electrical heated CMT can be used for new product development (NPD) and very low volume production as the cycle time of the part development was observed very high and life mould is yet to be tested. A deeper study of the life of the mould and associated electrical heater parameters to provide deployment for higher volume production with the improved cost of operation.