Development And Study Of CAD System For Solid Carbide Cutting Tools

Presently three-dimensional CAD software is widely used in manufacturing industry overseas. But most of domestic enterprises still adopt traditional two-dimensional CAD to design cutting tools, which costs a mass of time to make or update engineering drawings and calls for repeated work. All these defects extend the design cycle and increase cost, not meeting the requirement of CIMS for enterprises.In view of this situation, we can use well-developed three-dimensional CAD technology and make models for cutting tools by parametric design through secondary development. Furthermore, engineering drawings are designed and generated automatically in use of their relating to solid models.Based on mastery of Solidworks secondary development, dynamic link library(DLL), ADO and CBR technology, we develop CAD System for Solid Carbide Cutting Tools. This is an object-oriented three-dimensional CAD system, with Solidworks as the platform, VC++ as programming for design interface and Oracle as database.The menu of Solidworks is modified by secondary development in DLL mode, which achieves communication between MFC and Solidworks interface, with powerful Visual C++ and three-dimensional modeling technology of Solidworks fully applied. The cases library for solid carbide cutting tools is established integrating parametric technology and feather-modeling. A powerful DBMS is created in use of ADO technology joining Visual C++ and Oracle. The new tools are designed adopting CBR technology by modifying and optimizing the similar case in the library, which makes full use of existing experience.This system makes programmed and parametric design of cutting tools and automatically generates their models and 2D drawings, which can be two-way driven and updated, instantly. The database is easily modified and maintained and it can detect whether the input parameters meet the requirements and give some tips, which is convenient and reasonable to determine the parameters. This system makes tools' design from 2D to 3D, not only meeting enterprise's requirements (rapid, efficient and intelligent) but also improving products' competitiveness. In addition, it has got ready for farther CAE of cutting tools.