Research On Integration Of CAD/CAPP For Injection Mold

Nowadays, the applications of computer integrated manufacturing technology focuses on the fields of the injection mold developing in technical and technological process preparation. It comes from the facts that 80% of manufacturing costs are generated in the technical production preparation stage, especially in the procedure of mold design and technological process preparation. The application of CAD, CAM technology in mold manufacturing enterprises is a very effective way to arise mold design technology and to use CNC machining technology, and so that the "Bottleneck" effect of mold manufacturing and process planning is highlighted in mold factories. CAPP takes a bridge between the CAD and CAM connection. It is an essential and important work to compile mold machining process, in the case of using the conventional machining processing means in the mold parts production. The most often research works on the data information transmission between the system of CAD and CAPP have been making recently.This paper takes the injection mold CAD/CAPP integration technology as researching object, makes the CAD system as study starting point of CAPP system developing. By means of GT technology, Expert System and the fundamental theory of machining process, the further research and development has been made on CAD/CAPP integration technology in the several aspects as below. The following items are researched on the basis of SolidWorks and secondary development technology, and VB is used in programming to validate and verificate the realizations. The researching results have a great theoretical significance and practical value in the application and development of CAPP technology.Firstly, based on the CAD/CAPP integration technology research, the mold automatic generation mechanism have been mastered furtherly. Secondly, according to the features of injection mold parts in structural and technological characteristics, all of which are classified into the four types, which separately are the independent parts, the checking parts, the mosaic parts and the related parts. And then, a special classification coding system has been proposed, which is not only concerns about the structural and technology characteristics of injection mold, but also presents the relationship between parts as a primary factor into consideration. Furthermore, the classification of injection mold parts and automatic encoding are realized in the code system. Around the three generating methods of machining process, including the typical process, the CBR and the generative reasoning, the reasoning process of decision-making for the process design, and analysis of the operation dimension calculating method were discussed, which provides the foundation of generating machining process automatically for the self-made parts and added processing parts. Also the function on preparing and generating the process schedule card automatically was developed.