Classification Of Ceramic Sanitary Ware Products And Wash Parametric Cad Module Development

Ceramic sanitary wares are necessary equipments in modern families. They have many different types and complicated structures. In the sanitary industry, manual modeling is still widely applied in the developing process of new products which are usually copies of others. This situation results in long developing period and high cost. So, application of advanced manufacturing technologies, such as CAD, CAM and RP, to the developing and manufacturing processes of sanitary wares, is not only an inevitable trend of the ceramic sanitary industry, but also an important aspect of renovating traditional industries with information technologies.Based on the object classification research of ceramic sanitary wares, with the aid of object-oriented analysis method and knowledge based engineering, the paper presents the washing basin parametric CAD module with UG software as the developing platform. It mainly includes the following contents.1. According to the system requirement analyses, the total scenario is presented. The module is divided into two function parts, product design wizard and product edition wizard.2. Based on the function analyses and structure research on existing products, the object classification of sanitary wares is put forward. A ware consists of three classes which are product type, product dimension and product part.3. All kinds of knowledge are distilled from basin design standards, research data, product process and existing basin designs. After necessary arrangement, they form the knowledge base and deduction mechanism of washing basin.4. The UG/KF expression for some required basal curves, the key to parametric modeling of sanitary wares, and the realization routes of combining custom developing tools in UG are researched.5. The knowledge base is expressed by rules and classes in UG/KF language. Product, product type, product dimension, part, part shape curves and basal curve, the collection of them make up a whole washing basin. The mutual referencing relations among these classes comply with the knowledge deduction mechanism.6. These user defined KF classes, the interactive dialogs made by UlStyler and the user menu edited by MenuScript, are integrated by UG/OPEN API programs to realize the required system functions.The washing basin parametric CAD module provides a series of dialogs and parametric part shape curves. Following the guide of the wizards, it is facilitative and expeditious for users to design and edit parametric basin models. What they needs to do are only interactively choosing the product type and confirming the regulable curves parameters shown in the relevant dialogs.The object classification research of sanitary wares and the washing basin parametric CAD module not only are capable of being applied for new basin model design, but also provide necessary theories and viable realization routes for the CAD module research of other sanitary wares.