The Integrational Research Of Numerical Simulation, Rapid Prototyping And Mould Manufacturing

As an important part of manufacturing, mould technology has many virtues: highefficiency of production, good quality of product, economy of energy and material, lowcost and so on. It represents the idea of advanced manufacturing technologies. Thedesign and manufacture of the mould is a complex process. The structure of mould ischanged by the different product. The shape of the moulding surface is always complex.The amount of mould production is often small, sometimes just single. It is rare to seevolume-produce of mould. The design of mould is resort to the experience or thetraditional for long. It is difficult to ensure the quality of molding at each process beforeexamination and production. It needs many repeats of the process of design,manufacture,examination and modification during the traditional mould production.Therefor, it has the long cycle,the high cost and even the wrong product. It obviouslycan not fit to the growing market. To fit to the market and the need of other industry,mould technology is getting ahead by using the advanced manufacturing technologies.In this paper, I try to integrate RE,CAD/CAM,CAE and RP into the mouldmanufacturing. Due to RE,CAD/CAM,CAE and RP do things in their own ways, it isdifficult to integrate the information of each system. It is also difficult to compositivelyapply to the mould manufacturing. The point of this paper is the research the integrationof CAD/CAM/RE,CAD/CAM/CAE and CAD/CAM/RP and integrate the differentsystems by the way of data transformation. Then establish a integration system for themould manufacturing. The flow process of the integration system is: scan of the part,treating the points data, making the CAD model of the part, design the moulds of thepart, numerical simulation of molding, mend the moulds by the numerical simulation results, slicing the moulds, rapid prototyping of the moulds, generation the NC code ofthe moulds, machining the moulds. The integration system is validated by the exampleof automotive connecting-rod. According to the patent idea of automotiveconnecting-rod precise plastic rolling process, design four suits of moulds. The result ofthe numerical simulation shows that the four suits of moulds can satisfy the preciseplastic rolling process. Then product the four suits of moulds by rapid prototyping. Bycompare the integration way of mould design of connecting-rod to the traditional way ofmould design of connecting-rod we can see that the integration way can obviouslyshorten the cycle of mould design, reduce the cost of mould design and improve theprecision of the molding and the life of connecting-rod.