Automotive Panel Die Standardized Design Assistant System Based On CATIA

3D CAD system has been widely used in automobile die design and improved its efficiency and quality. These broadly applicable CAD systems only provide common modeling tools and do not specify die enterprise design standard. A lot of time and energy is wasted on looking up tables and calculating for the application of these systems. It is difficult to standardize the workflow and guarantee the die design quality. Therefore, it is necessary to develop an automobile die design system integrating the die enterprise design standard and guiding the die design synchronously.The paper analyzed the automobile panel die design standard and process of an automobile enterprise, and sorted out the requirements and functions of the automobile die design system based on the analysis. And specific to the problems in management and maintenance of design standards in the traditional off-line mode, automobile panel die standardizing design method based on C/S(client/server) framework was. This method can use the standard to guide the design synchronously in the design process, make designers be free from the continuous manual consulting the standard, and improve design efficiency and reduce error rate.The paper studied the key technology of automobile panel die standardizing design method. To enhance the compatibility, scalability and maintainability of the system, structured templates were applied on the management of assembly structure tree and BOM related standards. In standard parts library module, parametric modeling technology and associated parameter table were used to create standard part model, and solved the problem of cumbersome library building task met in traditional standard parts library; “user feature” method which can encapsulate standard part design process and make it invisible to users was used to prevent modeling technology information leaking; Multiple tree storage structure and automatic version checking method were used to make user query fast and conveniently and ensure version consistency. An algorithm of non-standard forging stock was proposed to deal with the inaccuracy in estimating non-standard forging blank and time-consuming problem in general BOM system. The algorithm discrete the part model into surface point set firstly and acquire forging stock size by calculating bounding box of the minimum convex hull of point set. It has high accuracy and efficiency.Based on the study on automobile panel die standardization design method applying C/S framework and its key technologies, automobile panel die standardized design assistant system(SDAS) was developed. SDAS consist of three module: the die structure management, the standard parts library and BOM. It can automatically create and manage die structure assembly tree, fast retrieve and assemble standard part, and automatically generate BOM. It can reduce workload of designer and improve the design efficiency.The paper ends with a practical die design as an example. SDAS was used in the design process and the result verified the good compatibility and usability of the system.