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Abstract 3D solid-modeling revolution has reached the design mainstream. While high-end 3D solid-modeling systems have been on engineers' workstation at large aerospace, consumer products and automobile companies for years. Many smaller companies are now making the switch from workstations to PC. One reason for the shift is that the flexibility and advancement of Windows-native/NT has let software developers create applications that are affordable and easy to use. High-end users are finding that mid-range solid modelers, such as SolidWorks, have met their needs.20495
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SolidWorks was chosen as the platform due to the Windows-native design envi-ronment, powerful assembly capabilities, ease-of-use, rapid learning curve, and af-fordable price. A Windows-native 3D plastic injection mold designs system has been implemented on an NT through interfacing Visual C++ codes with the commercial software, SolidWorks 99 and API. The system provides a designer with an interactive computer-aided design environment, which can both speed up the mold design pro-cess and facilitate standardization.
Keywords: Plastic injection mold; Windows; CAD; Parting
1. Introduction
With the broader use of plastics parts in a wide product range from consumer prod-ucts to machinery, cars and air-planes, the injection molding process has been recog-nized as an important manufacturing process. The mold design process is generally the critical path of a new product development. Conventionally, mold design has always been a much "mystified" art, requiring years of experience before one can be relatively proficient in it. Due to the initial difficulty in learning this art, less and less people are benefiting from the experience and knowledge of the experts in this field. To change the current situation, one way is to use a computer-aided design (CAD) system.
CAD as an everyday term has grown to a broad range of capabilities and has appli-cations in fields ranging from education for school teaching to three-dimensional me-chanical design. At the present time, most CAD systems provide only the geometric modeling functions that facilitate the drafting operations of mold design, and do not provide mold designers with the necessary knowledge to design the molds. Thus, much "add-on" software, e.g. IMOLD, have been developed on high-level 3D model-ing platforms to facilitate the mold design processes. Such an arrangement is advan-tageous in many ways. The 3D modeling platform provides plug-in software with a library of functions as well as an established user interface and style of programming. As a result, the development time for these "add-ons" is significantly reduced.
IMOLD (intelligent mold design) is a knowledge-based software application, which runs on the UG SolidWorks platform and is carried out by using the User Function provided. It is available on the UNIX and windows operation system. For years, mold design engineers have had to deal with two different systems, UNIX and PC. The former is widely used in engineering applications whilst the latter is used mainly in small and medium companies. Engineers also need to run corporate office applications such as word processing, spreadsheets, and project management tools, but these were not on their UNIX workstations.
Fortunately, the remarkable development of computer technology in the last decade has provided a way to change this situation. The most significant change has been in the area of computer hardware, i.e. the actual electronic components associated with data processing, Information storage and display technology, in terms of both speed and memory. These have resulted in the more efficient use of the solid-modeling func-tions in a PC-based CAD/CAM system. With the increased availability of sophisti-cated, low-cost software for Windows, more and more engineers are using PC appli-cations to get their jobs done. Thus the development of a new mold design application based on the Windows platforms is in high demand.