Basic Research And Application On Automatic Programming Of All Water Cutting Machine

The super-high pressure water jet is a new technology of non-traditional machining technics. As a new technology of non-traditional machining technics, the super-high pressure water jet has a quite wide application foreground owing to many of its strong points. However, some problems occur in the software matching water jet equipment. For example, in experimenting practical project, the software of All Numerical Control Water Cutting Machine DWJ-A-5 can not directly transforms the scanned image(the bitmap) into the vector image file identified by AutoCAD; this software has to read in the image with raster image form in AutoCAD and then draw the image contour with the poly-line by hand. As a result, the hand-worked drawing takes great efforts and time and produces some man-made errors, which make the body contour unsmooth and even anamorphic.To solve the above problems, the system which picks up vector information from image and the automatic programming system of the water cutting machine based on the AutoCAD 2000 are designed to convert the bitmap in the computer into the DXF file and to transform the DXF file into the numerical control instructions. The principal elements are as follows:1. Designing the system which picks up vector information from image. Studying the image processing theory and bitmap memory format; completing the image disposal and storage according to the system requirements and functional description; converting a color image into a gray-scale image; converting a gray-scale image to binary image; picking up the image contour points and fitting the point dates; outputting the fitting vector data by the DXF document format.2. Designing the automatic programming system based on AutoCAD 2000. On the basis of the further study of programming of ObjectARX and the operation of AutoCAD data base, the pick-up of information of the entities in AutoCAD is attained; topological and systematic processing path is generated by operating the database of AutoCAD. The internal contour and external contour of drawings to be processed are differentiated and then the contour is sequenced in accordance with the requirements of clockwise or counterclockwise processing. Finally NC code is generated according to numerical control system of water cutting machine.In summary, this paper mostly uses Visual C + + 6.0 to develop the system which picks up vector information from image and the second development tool of AutoCAD (ObjectARX2000) to develop an automatic programming system on the basis of AutoCAD 2000. The system which picks up vector information from image is designed to make up the deficiency of quondam automatic programming system which needs to draw the scanned image in computer by hand in AutoCAD, and directly converts Graphics into DXF files, hence improving the processing accuracy and reducing the workload. The automatic programming system generates the NC code properly and the actual processing verifies the correctness of the code.