Research And Development On Injection Mold CAD System Of Gear

More and more plastic gears of high accuracy and excellent performance are employed in the industry of household appliances and car. Because the demands of dimensional precision, form and position tolerance are very strict, the profile error caused by the shrinkage after molding must be taken into consider. To design a set of gear injection mold is a task full of difficulty, high-tech and heavy-load. The conventional design is hard to design and manufacture injection molds in a short time. During the design, some parts need to repeat designing many times. At present, the CAD/CAM software used in our country is mostly foreign ones. Although they are powerful, but the specialism is weak, and their standards in design are different from ours.The subject of research and development of gear injection mold CAD system based on Pro/ENGINEER is put forward, which is developed as a DLL with Pro/TOOLKIT and family table exploitation tools according to the object-oriented design concept in the integrated system of Visual C++ 6.0 integrated environment in C language on Windows XP operation platform. This system has the same powerful model function as Pro/ENGINEER, and having the dominance of C language such as structured programming, high operational efficiency. Also it has the entire Chinese man-computer interface in Pro/ENGINEER such as menu and dialog, and make it suitable for the mold designer.According to the structure characteristics of the gear and analysis of the merits and faults of all kinds of its components, the whole framework of gear injection mold is determined and optimized, also the main framework of the gear injection mold CAD system determined.In this system, standard parts database is created by family table and built the model based on the three-dimensional models of plastic gear or its injection mold. Finally the technical problem of auto draft in assembly graphics module was solved, and the plastic gear design module and its injection mold design module were established. The parameterized and auto draft function of plastic gear and its injection mold was realized in this system.The system was interface-friendly, convenient for operation and easy for the application of Pro/ENGINEER, reducing the amount of the work in the design of injection mold, resulting in raise of the design efficiency, achieving the research purpose and had a good practicability. The research of this paper is an exploration of three-dimensional CAD system of gear injection mold, and has some significance in researching and developing other mold CAD systems.