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Author:

Inui, Masatomo; Umezu Nobuyuki

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Abstract:

Most parts of mechanical products are fabricated by using molds and dies. In the automobile manufacturing case, at least 6 months are required for preparing molds and dies for producing all necessary parts. Cost and time reduction of the mold and die fabrication is a critical issue for any manufacturing companies. Part designers are basically not manufacturing experts, therefore they often design a part with various manufacturability problems. These problems are usually detected by machining experts in the later stage of the production. Problems are reported to the part designer and resolved by modifying the part shape. Such reworks generally need a lot of time and cost. Reduction of the rework is indispensable for realizing the efficient production of the mold and die. In this paper, we propose a novel software system named “manufacturability assistant” for reducing the reworks. This system can detect possible manufacturability problems in early part design stage. By using this system, designers can evaluate the quality of a part in the manufacturability view point. They can reflect the evaluation result in the part design to obtain a CAD model with higher manufacturability. An experimental system is implemented and some computation results are demonstrated.

Keywords:

Manufacturability evaluation, Rework reduction, Form feature extraction, Solid modeling, CAD