An Intelligent Manufacturing Advisor for Casting and Injection-Moulding Based on a Mid-Surface Approach

Lockett, Helen L. and Guenov, Marin D. (2002). An Intelligent Manufacturing Advisor for Casting and Injection-Moulding Based on a Mid-Surface Approach. In: Proceedings of the ASME Design Engineering Technical Conference, 29 Sep - 2 Oct 2002, Montreal, Canada.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1115/DETC2002/CIE-34497

Abstract

Products that are manufactured using near net-shape manufacturing processes must be designed with regard to the constraints of the manufacturing process. The purpose of this research project is to develop a knowledge based manufacturing advisor to assist designers of products for casting and injection moulding. The manufacturing advisor is tightly integrated with a CAD solid modeller, and uses a novel feature recognition approach to identify the manufacturing features of the part. A mid-surface abstraction from the part's solid geometry is used as the basis for feature recognition, and it is argued that this is a better approach to feature recognition for this class of parts than a CAD solid model. Initial testing indicates that the feature recognition process is able to effectively recognise a range of features but that the quality of the feature recognition is dependent on the mid-surface representation that is generated.