The Research And Development Of Plastic Mould Parts System Based On Multi-Software And Platform

With the development of CAD technology, the application of CAD/CAM for mould has been an effective approach to improve the quality and efficiency of mould design and manufacturing. However, the mould design based on CAD platform generally focuses on or pays more attention to problems in common such as curved surface modeling, mould parting and so on, but the structure design of mould has become a weak section, because it has been still carried out in a traditional routine which is very complicated and low-efficient. On the other hand, the parts in the structure design of plastic mould are usually serialized standard parts including guide pillar, guide sleeve, ingate sleeve, push slab etc or typical parts like upper holder or lower holder which have the same or similar structural unit. If designed or drawn manually, it may result in a lot of repetition work and human mistakes. Therefore, building parameterized standard parts libraries and intelligent design tools for plastic mould by the secondary development on the general CAD platform has become an inevitable choice to raise working efficiency and shorten development period of products.Under this background, the fundamental technology of the re-development on three current mainstream CAD softwares: AutoCAD, UG and Pro/E, and parameter-driven design methodology of establishing standard parts library based on these CAD platforms were researched comprehensively. And a plastic mould standard parts system were embedded on AutoCAD, UG and Pro/E platforms. The system breaked down the traditional developing mode for CAD part libraries and proposed a new method to develop a unified user's interface which is independent of all kinds of CAD platforms. In order to develop user's interface to access standard parts library and CAD modules respectively, the system made user's dialog based on .NET technology as standard COM component by using hybrid programming of VC++, C# and VB. The re-development programming of AutoCAD, UG and Pro/E could access parts data such as types and size parameters returned by public user's dialog by COM interface to create 2D or 3D part models and assemble them onto the mould automatically.In CAD developing modules, because AutoCAD does not support parametric design in 2D drawing and its re-development is most difficult, the implementation methods of standard parts library for AutoCAD based on ObjectARX were emphatically researched. Some AutoCAD API functions used frequently were encapsulated into one class, which made programming drawing more convenient and more concise, and a 2D plastic mould standard system satisfying enterprise's requirement and customer's need was finally established on AutoCAD. Moreover, the implementation methods of 3D parts libraries for UG and Pro/E were also discussed by using UG/Open and Pro/Toolkit tools respectively. In the end, a plastic mould standard parts libraries based on multi-platform were built. Its functions include parts type selecting, dynamic calculating for parameters available, CAD modeling, components positioning and assembling, and BOM outputting automatically. After installing the plug-in software suitable for customer's CAD platform, customer can easily finish mould design by picking up corresponding standard parts just by selecting part type or specifying part material, dimension and tolerance etc directly through three-level friendly interfaces.The system has been used in industry successfully, which raised working efficiency greatly and shorten development cycle of products.