Improving plastic injection molded part design is one of the most challenging tasks over past few years. The impact of plastics on the environment has enhanced the interest in this field. An improvement in plastic product design requires expert manufacturing knowledge to be fed to the designer at the initial design stage itself. This can be accomplished by integrating Design for Manufacturing (DFM) rules with a CAD based Plastic injection molding feature extraction module.
This research presents a novel methodology to extract manufacturing features from a plastic injection molded part. The geometric model of the part is converted to a IGES format. The B-Rep model of the part is subsequently regenerated from the IGES file and the relevant features are recognized using a rule-based feature extraction technique. Since the feature extractor uses the CAD neutral IGES file format, it does not require the part to be designed using feature-based design technique.
Another important contribution of this research is the development of a methodology to provide design recommendations to the part design using an automated design advisory system. The design advisory system uses a knowledge base of DFM rules, collected from various sources in order to provide design advices. Both the feature extraction and design advisory methodology developed is verified on different plastic injection molded parts.