Automatic Programming System For Mould Electrode Manufacturing And Discharging

There are cases where conventional manufacturing process using tools are not appropriate for the manufacture of mould,thus the unconventional electrical discharge machining method is widely used for its advantages of suitable for complex mould shape,non-contact processing and high precision.Dozens of electrodes,occasionally hundreds of electrodes are needed for the manufacture of a single mould,therefore the designing and manufacturing process for large number of electrodes become a bottle neck for improving productivity.Commercial CAD/CAM module provide a rather low level of automation of manufacturing process planning and a weak connection between the CAD and CAM part.It requires extensive human interaction in the process of electrode manufacture,drawing generation and discharging code programming.Current electrode manufacturing and discharging process depend highly on the personal knowledge of engineering staff with the drawbacks of complicated manual operation and low productivity.This paper researched on the problems in the process of electrode manufacturing process planning,drawing generation,CMM measurement and compensation,discharging manufacturing.The electrode manufacturing and discharging automatic programming system was developed and it focused mainly on three key aspects:(1)A surface-based automatic manufacturing feature recognition algorithm was developed by analyzing the typical electrode structure and manufacturing experience,upon which an automatic manufacturing process planning system was designed to build a complete mould electrode automatic programming system.(2)Researched on the requirements of electrode drawing generation and proposed a general electrode information management method and critical dimension generation method,on which an automatic electrode drawings generation system was developed.(3)Researched on the typical process of electrode discharging and built the automatic programming system for discharging code generation under requirements of electrode dimension tolerance detection,discharging precision selection and discharging pattern specification.Electrodes with unqualified dimension tolerance were automatically rejected and qualified electrodes solely are listed out for discharging code generation.This paper designed and developed the electrode automatic programming system on NX platform and achieved a high level of automation in electrode CAD/CAM/CMM/EDM process.The system was applied to practical applications and verified to improve mould productivity.