Research And Development Of The Case-based Intelligent System For Injection Mold Design

The design of injection mold has direct effect on the quality and efficiency of plastic molding, and on the difficulty, cost and time of mold manufacture. At present, universal CAD/CAM/CAE systems have been widely used in many factories to aid designing injection mold. However, these systems can not support how to design a perfect injection mold when proceeding concept design, and just support testing the scheme of injection mold after concept designing, which has seriously restricted the improvement of quality and efficiency of design and manufacturing. Hence, the application of expert system in the field of injection mold design has been studied in this thesis. Initially, the process and the content of injection mold design are summarized, and the problems of traditional injection mold design are analyzed in this thesis. The new injection mold design system is studied and the technology of intelligent injection mold design is emphatic investigation. On overall, a method of applying expert system to injection mold design is presented. The design of injection mold is mainly depended on the experience, which is a distinct characteristic of injection mold design. And the past experiences of mold design have important effect on the currently injection mold design. Due to this cause, the application of expert system by the technology of CBR in injection mold design is studied in detail. The key techniques for CBR are elaborated. With the investigation in the factories and the analysis of plastic product and injection mold, an effective case representation methodology is presented. The cases are added to the case library by the proper techniques of case organization. The similarities of cases are defined. Case retrieval strategy is studied and algorithm of the retrieval strategy is developed. Finally an expert system of injection mold design has been developed on the basis of theoretical study. The system consists of four modules, i.e., case retrieval, case information , case reuse and case management.