Research On Process Automated Planning For Parts Of Injection Mold Based On Pro/ENGINEER

With the popularization of CAD/CAM in die & mold industry, to employ CAPP in changing the traditional process plan and making a real integration of CAD/CAM is now becoming a research focus in die & mould technology.In order to improve the consistency of information flow from injection mould design to production and to enhance the automation of process plan, the author made a research on two key technologies of injection mould CAPP: information retrieval from CAD and process routine decision. The results are listed below:Firstly the author analyzed the characteristic method of part modeling in Pro/E's mould-design module. Based on the analysis results, the machining features of injection mould parts were classified and the pre-definition of the machining features were given. A hybrid method, which combines automatic feature conversion with inter-active definition of feature, was presented and implemented. The method can retrieve the information of machining feature effectively thus to solve the problem of CAD/CAPP integration.Follow researches have been made on the bottleneck of CAPP, the process routine decision of part:Aimed at the limitation of characterization of parts information for process plan using single-feature representation method, the concept of inter-feature constraints was presented. The basic types of inter-feature constraints were classified and the effects of each type on process routine decision were discussed in detail.An algorithm based on constraints-matching was presented to solve the problem of process routine decision. In this algorithm, the constraints of general machining process are represented by a standard process routine and the inter-feature constraints are considered as a punish factor. The algorithm was implemented using Genetic Algorithm and the result was tested.Finally, on the basis of theories mentioned above, an injection molding CAPP prototype system was completed and the main problems of CAPP: information retrieval from CAD and process routine decision was accomplished in the system.The characteristics and innovations of this paper are: firstly, based on the detail classification of machining features of injection mould parts, a hybrid method, which can retrieve the machining feature information on Pro/E's mold-design module, was given. Secondly, the concept of inter-feature constraints was presented to overcome the limitation of parts representation using single-feature method for process plan. Thirdly, an algorithm based on constraints-matching was presented. In this algorithm,...