Virtual Prototyping Technology In The Design And Development Of The Cnc Bending Machine

Long U pipe bender is an equipments in air-condition manufacture which integrated with the function of straightening, rounding, feeding, cutting and bending formation. The traditional design takes long production period, causes high cost and inconvenient design and revising, and the main cause is that the processes of analyzing , testing and revising are facing up to the physical prototype. The method based on virtual prototyping takes the 3D numerical modals as studying object, studied the interrelated performance of the 3D numerical modals combined with the theory of CAE. This method transmitted the research to the digital platform, which speeds up the design, reduces the cost. Virtual prototype, as a new technology for the pipe bender design, is absolutely an innovation compared with the traditional design method.The TBLU7 pipe bender was taken as the research object which was requested by a company located in the Zhongshan City, Guangdong Province. The innovative virtual prototype technology was used to study the statical feature and dynamical characteristic of the 3D numerical modal, which gave the reference for the design of TBLU7 NC pipe bender. The correlative aspects were also discussed in the TBLU7 NC pipe bender design process which included building the TBLU7 virtual prototype model by the 3D software UG, studying and summarizing the data exchange technology between UG and the CAE software ANSYS, making the static properties analysis on some main parts and making the dynamical properties analysis on the key parts and the whole machine. The finite element method was used to simulate the process of pipe bending, validate that the design met with the requirement according to the bending simulation results.Main jobs have been finished as followed:(1) At first introducing the basic theory frame of the virtual prototype, looking back the domestic and foreign current research situations and the development trends and demonstrating the necessities of applying the virtualprototype technology to the TBLU7 pipe bender.(2) Building the virtual prototype model of the parts in the UG environment and building the whole machine model by assembling the parts.(3) Importing the virtual prototype model to the finite element analysis software ANSYS in the data exchange format to make the static structure analysis and parts optimizing.(4) By the virtual prototype model, making the whole model analysis to improve its dynamical properties.(5) Introducing the pipe bending formation theory, using finite element method to simulate the pipe beding, validating whether the design met with the technical request according to the bending simulation results.