CAD For Pressure Vessel Shell Based On Expert System And Feature Parameterization

Large petro-chemical pressure vessel, comprising four species including reactor and separator, is the outcome with the largening of scale in petro-chemical industry. The design of large petro-chemical pressure vessel is a complicated design work of mechanical production. So it is of much important sense to guarantee its design quality, shorten its design period, and improve its design efficiency.With petro-chemical pressure vessel as the design object, this article has used much advanced design methods, and developed a petro-chemical pressure vessel-CAD software for Dalian Design & Research Institute of China First Heavy Industries. This software mainly has two functions: two-dimensional parametrical design & drawing, and rapid three-dimensional automatic entity modeling.During the course of software development, this article has adopted life-cycle-based model, and synthetically applied DAO and object-oriented analysis & design methods. The design & drawing flat is AutoCAD 2000, and the development environment is Visual C++ 6.0 combined with ObjectARX 2000 SDK.The petro-chemical pressure vessel-CAD system is composed of expert system for shell design, parametrical drawing part, and database management system. It also could be divided into five modules: initialization, part design, parts assemblage, tool, and entity modeling.On the basis of two-dimensional design, a rapid three-dimensional automatic entity modeling function has been developed, which could transform the production model from two-dimension to three-dimension, and transfer the entity model from CAD software to CAE software.