The Research And Development Of Mold CAD System Based On Multi-Platform

With the development of CAD technology, the application of CAD/CAM for mold has been an effective method to improve the quality and efficiency of mold design and manufacturing. However, CAD system is mainly developed based on a single CAD platform, and you have to redevelop it in the corresponding CAD platform if you want apply it to another CAD system. On the other hand, the parts in the structure design of mold are usually serialized typical standard parts or parts like upper holder and lower holder which have the similar structure. If they are designed or drawn manually, it may result in a lot of repetition work and design errors. Therefore, building a cross-platform mold CAD system has become an inevitable choice to raise working efficiency and shorten development period of products.Under this background, the system with the demands of the enterprise for an important basis and with standard parts for mold as target objects can support several kinds of CAD system. Through the deepening of re-development technology of the three mainstream CAD systems: AutoCAD, NX and Pro/E and parameter-driven design methodology of establishing standard parts library based on these CAD platforms, this mold CAD system is different from the traditional developing mode that based on a single CAD platform and use a cross platform structure. Combining with COM, ActiveX and ADO, a mold CAD system which can support AutoCAD, NX and Pro/E and internet environment is developed.In 3D preview and engineering drawing automatic generation modules, this system employ ACIS and HOOPS components which are the most popular modeling and displaying components and develop an ActiveX Control based on the web through which user can preview the model before modeling. Besides, the key technologies are introduced in this paper, such as parameter constraint processing, customization of standard parts and parametric modeling in different CAD system.The system has been used in industry successfully, which raised working efficiency greatly and shorten development cycle of products.