Bonding Methods for Laminated Tooling

Laminated tooling consists of an array of stacked laminations that are mechanically clamped or bonded together, depending on the requirements of the manufacturing process. Various manufacturing processes that can benefit from tooling constructed oflaminations include sheet metal forming, thermoforming, composites molding, metal extrusion, injection molding, resin transfer molding, and compression molding. When bonding of the laminations is required (e.g., incorporation of conformal cooling passages for injection molding temperature control) then laminations can be joined together by diffusion bonding, brazing and using adhesives. However, for a tooling engineer to effectively design a laminated tool, the physical and mechanical properties of these joints must be known. Consequently, a set of experiments is outlined for determining the tensile, shear, and peel strengths, tensile and shear elastic moduli, thermal contact resistance, and specific permeability (for gasses or liquids) ofthe aforementioned bonded joints for both steel and aluminum laminations. Some preliminary results with aluminum and future work are presented.