Automatized design of injection molds
The goal of this project is to develop the proof of concept for a novel injection-molding design workflow, making mold design accessible to a new, semi-professional user base of designers, engineers, and artists. It will provide a more more cost-efficient way of bringing lower-volume and customized products to the market. Recently, the related Materializable ERC Starting Grant has lead to the invention of novel computational tools for mold design, where the decomposition of a general 3D shape into moldable parts - together with the generation of the corresponding mold geometry - is performed fully automatically. The three main advantages of our method are (i) a drastic reduction of the time requirements of mold design (from hours/days down to minutes) and (ii) the discovery of highly efficient shape decompositions with curved part boundaries, which are very hard to design manually due to their counterintuitive nature. Furthermore, our method allows (iii) a non-expert to refine the aesthetics of the decomposition without being aware of the specifics of molding; these are enforced in the background. In order to evaluate the industrial and commercial potential of this invention, we propose the development of a software prototype for automatized mold design.