Abstract Mold design is a knowledge-intensive process.This paper describes a knowledge-based oriented, paramet-ric, modular and feature-based integrated computer-aided design/computer-aided engineering (CAD/CAE) system for mold design. Development of CAx systems for numerical simulation of plastic injection molding and mold design has opened new possibilities of product analysis during the mold design. The proposed system integrates Pro/ENGINEER system with the specially developed module for the calculation of injection molding parameters, mold design, and selection of mold elements. The system interface uses parametric and CAD/CAE feature-based database to streamline the process of design, editing, and reviewing. Also presented are general structure and part of output results from the proposed CAD/CAE-integrated injection mold design system.6276
Keywords Mold design . Numerical simulation . CAD .CAE
1 Introduction
Injection molding process is the most common molding process for making plastic parts. Generally, plastic injection molding design includes plastic product design, mold design, and injection molding process design, all of which contribute to the quality of the molded product as well as production efficiency. This is process involving many design parameters that need to be considered in a concurrent manner. Mold design for plastic injection molding aided by computers has been focused by a number of authors worldwide for a long period. Various authors have developed program systems which help engineers to design part, mold, and selection parameters of injection molding. During the last decade, many authors have developed computer-aided design/computer-aided engineering (CAD/CAE) mold de- sign systems for plastic injection molding. Jong et al. developed a collaborative integrated design system for concurrent mold design within the CAD mold base on the web, using Pro/E. Low et al. developed an application for standardization of initial design of plastic injection molds. The system enables choice and management of mold base of standard mold plates, but does not provide mold and injection molding calculations. The authors proposed a methodology of standardizing the cavity layout design system for plastic injection mold such that only standard cavity layouts are used. When standard layouts are used, their layout configurations can be easily stored in a database. Lin at al. describe a structural design system for 3D drawing mold based on functional features using a minimum set of initial information. In addition, it is also applicable to assign the functional features flexibly before accomplishing the design of a solid model for the main parts of a drawing mold. This design system includes modules for selection and calculation of mold components. It uses Pro/E modules Pro/Program and Pro/Toolkit, and consists of modules for mold selection, modification and design. Deng et al. analyzed development of the CAD/CAE integration. The authors also analyzed systems and problems of integration between CAD and CAE systems for numerical simulation of injection molding and mold design. Authors propose a feature ontology consisting of a number of CAD/CAE features. This feature represents not only the geometric information of plastic part, but also the design intent is oriented towards analysis. Part features contain the overall product information of a plastic part, wall features, development features (such as chamfer, ribs, boss, hole, etc.), treatment features which contain analysis-related design information and subwall/developed features. Wall and development features are so called “component features”. Godec et al. developed a CAE system for mold design and injection molding parameters calculations. The system is based on morphology matrix and decision diagrams. The system is used for thermal, rheological and mechanical calculation, and material base management, but no integration with commercial CAx software is provided. Huang et al. developed a mold-base design system for injection molding. The database they used was parametric and feature-based oriented. The system used Pro/E for modeling database components. Kong et al. developed a parametric 3D plastic injection mold design system integrated with solid works. Other knowledge-based systems, such as IMOLD, ESMOLD, IKMOULD, and IKBMOULD, have been developed for injection mold design. IMOLD pides mold design into four major steps; parting surface design, impression design, runner system design, and mold-base design. The software uses a knowledge-based CAD system to provide an interactive environment, assist designers in the rapid completion of mold design, and promote the standardization of the mold design process. IKB-MOULD application consists of databases and knowledge bases for mold manufacturing. Lou et al. developed an integrated knowledge-based system for mold-base design. The system has module for impression calculation, dimension calculation, calculation of the number of mold plates and selection of injection machine. The system uses Pro/Mold Base library. This paper describes KBS and key technologies, such as product modeling, the frame-rule method, CBS, and the neural networks. A multilayer neural network has been trained by back propagation BP. This neural network adopts length, width, height and the number of parts in the mold as input and nine parameters (length, width, and height of up and down set-in, mold bases side thickness, bottom thickness of the core, and cavity plates) as output. Mok et al. developed an intelligent collaborative KBS for injection molds. Mok at el. has developed an effective reuse and retrieval system that can register modeled standard parts using a simple graphical user interface even though designers may not know the rules of registration for a database. The mold design system was developed using an Open API and commercial CAD/computer-aided manufacturing (CAM)/CAE solution. The system was applied to standardize mold bases and mold parts in Hyundai Heavy Industry. This system adopted the method of design editing, which implements the master model using features. The developed system provides methods whereby designers can register the master model, which is defined as a function of 3D CAD, as standard parts and effectively reuse standard parts even though they do not recognize the rules of the database. Todic et al. developed a software solution for auto-mated process planning for manufacturing of plastic injection molds. This CAD/CAPP/CAM system does not provide CAE calculation of parameters of injection molding and mold design. Maican et al. used CAE for mechanical, thermal, and rheological calculations. They analyzed physical, mechanical, and thermal properties of plastic materials. They defined the critical parameters of loaded part. Nardin et al. tried to develop the system which would suit all the needs of the injection molding for selection of the part–mold–technology system. The simulation results consist of geometrical and manufacturing data. On the basis of the simulation results, part designers can optimize part geometry, while mold designers can optimize the running and the cooling system of the mold. The authors developed a program which helps the programmers of the injection molding machine to transfer simulation data directly to the machine. Zhou et al. developed a virtual injection molding system based on numerical simulation. Ma et al. developed standard component library for plastic injection mold design using an object oriented approach. This is an object oriented, library model for defining mechanical components parametrically. They developed an object-oriented mold component library model for incorporating different geometric topologies and non-geometric information. Over the years, many researchers have attempted to automate a whole mold design process using various knowledge-based engineering (KBE) approaches, such as rule-based reasoning (RBR), and case base (CBR) and parametric design template (PDT). Chan at al. developed a 3D CAD knowledge-based-assisted injection mold design system (IKB mold). In their research, design rules and expert knowledge of mold design were obtained from experienced mold designers and hand-books through various traditional knowledge acquisition processes. The traditional KBE approaches, such as RBR, CBR, and simple PDT have been successfully applied to mold cavity and runner layout design automation of the one product mold. Ye et al. proposed a feature-based and object-oriented hierarchical representation and simplified symbolic geometry approach for automation mold assembly modeling. The previously mentioned analysis of various systems shows that authors used different ways to solve the problems of mold design by reducing it to mold configurator (selector). They used CAD/CAE integration for creating precision rules for mold-base selection. Many authors used CAE system for numerical simulation of injection molding to define parameters of injection molding. Several also developed original CAE modules for mold and injection molding process calculation. However, common to all previously mentioned systems is the lack of module for calculation of mold and injection molding parameters which would allow integration with the results of numerical simulation. This leads to conclusion that there is a need to create a software system which integrates parameters of injection molding with the result obtained by numerical simulation of injection molding, mold calculation, and selection. All this would be integrated into CAD/CAE-integrated injection mold design system for plastic products. 注塑模具设计CAD/CAE集成英文文献和翻译:http://www.youerw.com/fanyi/lunwen_3725.html