A Rapid Modeling Method Of Foot Model For Green Manufacturing Of Orthosesand System Development

Orthoses are important tools to help patients recover in the clinical environment aswell as the disables and elderly live independently. Hence, researching on orthosesmanufacturing technology has very important significance for the improvement ofpeople’s living standard. The traditional manufacturing of orthoses often involves theuse of the plaster cast, which causes the low utilization efficiency of the mould, seriousresource waste and environmental pollution problems. Introducing the reconfigurablemanufacturing technology into the fabrication of orthoses can improve the productionefficiency of orthoses and reduce the labor intensity. And the application ofreconfigurable mould can also solve the problems of the waste of the large amount ofresource and environmental pollution caused by the use of special plaster moulds in thetraditional manufacturing process. Accordingly, reconfigurable mould technology canbe viewed as a typical method for green manufacturing of orthoses. Therefore, thispaper presents a convenient and fastmodeling method of foot model for greenmanufacturing of orthoses. The method supplies the foot model for the automaticgeneration of the reconfigurable mould, which will be helpful to manufacture theorthoses mould without the expertise and improve the production efficiency of orthoses,and also provides the support for the green manufacturing of orthoses. The researchcontents include the following sections:Firstly, the existing problems in the orthoses manufacturing are analyzed and thegreen manufacturing technologies of reconfigurable moulds are reviewed.On this basis,the framework of the rapid modelingmethod of foot model for green manufacturing oforthoses is proposed. The steps of rapid modeling of foot model are described briefly inthis framework based on the similarity analysis of foot components and then theframework of the rapid modelingmethod of foot model for green manufacturing oforthoses is established.Then, the foot data collecting and preprocessing technology are reviewed, and thecollecting method of foot data and the collecting equipment are described. Further, inorder to get the satisfactory foot mesh model and make a good preparation for thesurface construction, the obtained foot data are preprocessed, including the filtering,simplification, mesh processing and smoothing.Furthermore, the key technology of the rapid modeling of foot model is researched, which includes the segmentation of the smooth foot mesh model, the curve fitting on thesegmented mesh blocks, the curve adjustment, the surface fitting and the splice of thefitted surface patches to get the foot surface model. After this, the error of the surfacemodel is analyzed and solid processed and the rapid modeling of the foot model isfinished.Based on the above research, the rapid modeling system of foot model isestablished by the secondary development on the famous reversing engineeringsoftware PowerSHAPE using the Microsoft Visual Studio2010. And the result of thecase shows that the proposed method is feasible and effective to rapidly generate thefoot model for green manufacturing.