Research And Development On 3D Pipe Design System

Pipe design is a universal engineering which is used in national defense, petroleum, national gas, chemical industry, ship-building plant, electric power and textile industry. Compared with conventional ways, 3D pipe laying CAD system can design it intelligently, automatically and digitalized completely. It is more efficient and smart, and has obvious advantages for improving design efficiency and quality.Now the excellent special software for designing pipes is all from companies of Europe or American. These products are always large-scale and expensive. Furthermore, the whole system is very complicated and only can be mastered by the users who have much knowledge on computer, foreign language and industry design. It is difficult to be popularized. So it is significant to develop a kind of advanced 3D pipe design software independently recur to foreign technology.The purpose of this paper is to develop a 3D pipe CAD software with perfect function, high efficiency and reliability which is accustomed by the engineers in our country. Based on 3D software-JhSolid, used in the assemble environment, designed by the method of Object-Oriented technology, making use of 3D solid modeling technology of geometry and character integrated, and taking fully advantage of interface functions provided by parasolid, solid entities are constructed, and displayed by OpenGL.Concrete functions are as follows: locating the start and end points of the pipe; selecting the project when automatically producing the center lines; imputing the coordination of the linking points of the project when drawing them manually; producing the center lines; editing and changing the center lines; producing 3D solid; editing and changing solid; querying information of the parts and collecting them to output. In this system laying dimensional pipes which is one of the critical technologies in the pipe engineering has been come true. On aspect of laying the center lines of the pipes, in order to improve the efficiency and to adapt the different usage, two ways of producing the center lines are provided for selecting: one is producing it automatically and the other is drawing it after manually inputting the linking points. On the aspect of producing the 3D solid, sweep is used to generate models. At the moment of producing the pipe path, system checks whether there are intersectant lines. If there is any not fit for the need of the design, its direction can be changed. If there are pipe solids not fit for design found after they have been produced, they can be modified by changing their paths or parameters. In order to cooperate with analysis system of the next step, it is come true to query the information of the parts and outputting them.It has verified that this program has succeeded in realizing above-mentioned functions, which prove the correctness and feasibility of this method.