Research And Application Of CATIA/CAA Based Virtual Assembly Modeling

With the rapid development of information technology and network technology, the market competition in the field of manufacturing is aggravating constantly. It is becoming the goal that each enterprise pursues to develop and produce the products of high quality and low cost in the shortest time. In the field of concurrent engineering, one can utilize the computer to simulate the visual assembling process of the 3D digitized products, so as to check interference situation of assembling process, and to prove and analyze the assembly feasibility. For the new product development this can make us easier to find the errors as early as possible in the process of design, manufacturing and assembly. Therefore, the virtual assembly technology is very significant for guaranteeing the product quality and reliability, ensuring the feasibility and optimality of assembly sequence planning, reducing the production cost, and shortening the production time. Based upon the visual assembly relevant technologies, the product assembly modeling is discussed, and a modeling adaptive to CATIA products virtual assembly is presented. This modeling provides good information supports for expressing the information of product assembly model levels, assembly relations and features. We placed the emphases on the foundation of CATIA/CAA product virtual assembly information modeling. It concludes how to use CAA to extract CATIA product assembly information, how to use Microsoft Visual C++ to process the data obtained, and how to setup the form of assembly relation matrix file. As a result, the modeling is proved to be available on the application of establishing the assembly sequence planning and assembly route planning.