Research On Key Technologies Of The Progressive Die CAD System Based On Pro/ENGINEER

The die&mould industry is playing a more and more important role in China’s national economy, and as the forefront technology of the industry research, die&mould design CAD technology have an unparalleled advantage in reducing the cost of designing, manufacturing and improving the competitiveness of products. In this paper, some key technologies of the CAD system focused on the progressive die which is widly used in the die&mould industry are studied, to achieve rapid and automatic progressive die design, and finally improve the efficiency and quality.This paper is based on Microsoft Visual Studio.NET2003as the program development environment, and through environment settings, achieved seamless integration with the general-purposed CAD/CAM/CAE software Pro/ENGINEER wildfire3.0, so programs can directly access and call the underlying functions of Pro/E. On this basis, by using Pro/TOOLKIT, UDF and other development tools, secondary developments are carried out on user interfaces and functions of Pro/E, to meet the demands of computer aided design of progressive die design.With researchs on some key technologies of the progressive die design, such as parameterized design of workpiece, automatic layout design and automatic assembly of mould’s structure, the system achieved the function of workpiece"s parametric modeling, auto-unbend the bending parts, calculate the maximal material utilization of layout, automatic generation of standard die set and parts, automatic assembly of mould structures and so on. Particularly, through the analysis and studies of layout algorithms, achieved optimization solution of single-row layout of press pieces with contour shape unlimited, automatically calculate the maximal material utilization of layout, improved the efficiency of layout design.The program of the system runs correctly, achieved the anticipated research purpose with test of examples.