The Research And Development Of Intelligent CAD System For Stamping Die Parts

With the development of CAD technology, the application of CAD/CAM for mould has been an effective approach to improve the efficiency of mould design and manufacturing. However, the mould design based on CAD platform generally focuses on or pays more attention to problems incommon such as curved surface modeling, mould parting and so on, but the structure design of mould has become a weak section, because it has been still carried out in a traditional routine which is very complicated and low-efficient. On the other hand, the parts in the structure design of stamping die are usually serialized standard parts including pilot pin, fixed block, guide posts and bushings etc or typical parts like upper holder or lower holder which have the same or similar structural unit. Therefore, building parameterized standard parts libraries and intelligent design tools for stamping die by the secondary development on the general CAD platform has become an inevitable trend to raise working efficiency and shorten development period of products.Under this background, we have developed a system which breaked down the traditional developing mode for CAD part libraries and proposed a new method to develop a unified user's interface which is independent of all kinds of CAD platforms. In order to develop user's interface to access standard parts library and CAD modules respectively, the system made user's dialog based on some functions as standard COM component or DLL by using hybrid programming of VC++. The re-development programming of AutoCAD, NX and Pro/E could access parts data such as types and size parameters returned by public user's dialog by interface to create 2D or 3D part models and assemble them onto the mould automatically.In CAD developing modules, the achievement of the intelligent system based on Pro/E were emphatically researched. The implementation methods of 3D parts libraries for Pro/E were discussed by using Pro/Toolkit tools respectively. In the end, a stamping die standard parts libraries based on multi-platform were built. Its functions include parts type selecting, dynamic calculating for parameters available, CAD modeling and assembling, and BOM outputting automatically. After installing the plug-in software suitable for customer's CAD platform, customer can easily finish mould design by picking up corresponding standard parts just by selecting part type or specifying part material, dimension and tolerance etc directly through three-level friendly interfaces. The user can also choose the standard parts and assemble it to a die depending on the actual demand of stamping die design, achieving the design quickly and generate BOM chart or order form of standard components and parts.The system has been used in industry successfully, which raised working efficiency greatly and shorten development cycle of stamping die products.