Injection Mold Cad System Unigraphics Platform-based Research And Development

In mould industry, whether a mould is qualified or not heavily depends on the design of the mould. What's more, in order to meet the requirements of the quickly changing market, such as the varieties, serials, small mass of quantities and short period about the plastic products, it is vital to optimize the structure of the mould, so as to improve the efficiency and productivity of the mould. So the design method and process of the mould are quite important in the course of mould designing and manufacturing.For this reason, the CAD technology has been introducing to mould industry, which has improved the design efficiency of the mould greatly. In this thesis, a knowledge-based injection mould designing system (KIMDS) is presented under the environment of Unigraphics, which realizes the automatization and intelligentizing of the design procedure of the mould to a certain extent so as to highly improve the design efficiency of the mould. Meanwhile, the basic principle of the rapid-exchangeable core mould was embedded in the KIMDS, in order to solve some problems occurring in the course of mould design about the plastic products which have the features of similar structure and serials.The following issues are mainly studied and addressed in this thesis:1. The general process and method of mould design were discussed, which are the foundation of establishing the overall architecture of the KIMDS, and the basic principle of rapid-exchangeable core mould design method was studied, which is one of the innovations of the system.2. The overall architecture of the KIMDS was set up, and the partition of functional modules of the system was finished based on the software engineering technology and IDEFO methods. Meanwhile, the data management between the KIMDS and Unigraphics platform was investigated, and the data transfer mechanism and the data flow in the KIMDS were established.3. Based on the profound investigation on the software development using Unigraphics, The interface of the KIMDS was designed. A new user interface design method, which is referred as process wizard with a feature of learning, was put forward to lead the users to fulfill the mould design step by step. The overall program structure of the KIMDS was set up on the basis of the process wizard.4. The main modules of the KIMDS, such as project initialization module, parting module, standard mould base & standard part module, and etc., as well as the key issues for their programming and implementation, were presented. Among them, the correlation mechanism between the modules and the knowledge database of the KIMDS are the most pivotal. At last, the application of the system was introduced through a simple example.The KIMDS is focused on the structure design and the assembly modeling for injection moulds. At present, it is still in researching and developing phase. However it has been already a prototype mould design CAD system with a rational and integrity structure as well as power function.