Electrical discharge machining (EDM) is widely used in mold manufacturing to form the intricate geometric features which are difficult to be produced by the conventional machining process. Owing to the use of a large ...
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Electrical discharge machining (EDM) is widely used in mold manufacturing to form the intricate geometric features which are difficult to be produced by the conventional machining process. Owing to the use of a large number of electrodes, the cost and time consumption for electrode design and NC programming has become a bottleneck in boosting productivity of mold enterprises. Although computer-aided design (CAD)/computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) systems are widely used, because of the complex shapes and diversity of electrodes, manual operations are commonly employed to generate process plans and toolpaths for electrode manufacturing, which is cumbersome and error-prone. In order to realize the intelligent manufacturing of electrodes in such a knowledge-intensive domain, this paper presents a feature-based integration approach of CAD/computer-aided process planning (CAPP)/CAM. A hierarchical taxonomy of electrode features is introduced and a hybrid feature recognition method is proposed to build multi-level feature tree. Then, feature knowledge and domain know-how based process planning and optimization are achieved followed by automatic tool path generation which aim to machining the electrode precisely and economically. In the framework of system integration, a structured product model is established to capture and encapsulate geometric entities, machining features, technical information, process plans, and measurement data of machining error to realize seamless flow of information among CAD/CAPP/CAM systems. The effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed approach are demonstrated by case studies and industry implementation.
CAD/CAM development over the past few decades has significantly improved design and manufacturing efficiency. Although CAD, CAPP and CAM technology has advanced greatly, the links between these systems are still weak....
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CAD/CAM development over the past few decades has significantly improved design and manufacturing efficiency. Although CAD, CAPP and CAM technology has advanced greatly, the links between these systems are still weak. Currently the information from CAD and CAPP systems cannot be interpreted directly by CAM systems. It is the users who interpret the information and make the connection between CAD and CAM systems. The current method to generate toolpaths and NC programs, especially machining geometry preparation, involves extensive manual interactions in a CAM system. To improve production efficiency further, a tighter CAD/CAM integration is needed to automate the design-to-manufacturing process. The paper discusses the automation of toolpathgeneration in an integrated CAD/CAPP/CAM system based on machining features. Machining features are utilized to carry machining geometry information from CAPP to CAM systems. An integration layer between FBMach and Unigraphics is implemented to achieve an integrated CAD/CAPP/CAM system based on machining features. The integration layer makes product information as well as process information available immediately in an electronic form for the preparation of toolpaths. The integrated system automates the process of toolpathgeneration from solid models and significantly reduces user interactions and the amount of time preparing toolpaths.
This paper describes an efficient toolpath generator, capable of automatically generating the NC code needed to manufacture arbitrarily shaped pockets with constant depth. The pockets are defined by contours consisti...
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This paper describes an efficient toolpath generator, capable of automatically generating the NC code needed to manufacture arbitrarily shaped pockets with constant depth. The pockets are defined by contours consisting of line-segments and arcs, and may contain islands of unremoved material (also defined by contours of line-segments and arcs). The algorithm used to construct the contour parallel toolpath is based on Voronoi diagrams and has an O(n log(n)) complexity, where n denotes the number of contour-segments defining the pocket's boundary.
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