Analysis of several problems in the process of mold design and manufacture

The mold is no longer just a sand box used by humans to cast coins and inner casings. Today. It condenses all kinds of high technology, can quickly and accurately form, weld, and assemble materials into parts, components or products. Its efficiency, precision, streamline, ultra-miniaturization, energy saving, environmental protection, and product performance and appearance And so on, are unparalleled by traditional craftsmanship. Looking into the 21st century, no matter which industries such as electronics, biology, materials, automobiles, home appliances, etc., are not equipped with production lines built by computers, molds and processing centers, it is impossible to take the lead in the manufacturing industry. Mold is an important equipment of modern manufacturing technology, and its level indicates the manufacturing level and production capacity of a country or enterprise. For a period of time in the future, the key to the product quality, batch cost and technological progress including industrial renewal of my country's five pillar industries is molds. Now the total output value of global molds has long surpassed the total output value of the traditional machinery industry-machine tools and tools.

Modular design of mold

Shortening the design cycle and improving design quality is one of the keys to shorten the entire mold development cycle. Modular design is to use the similarity of product parts in structure and function to realize the standardization and combination of products. A lot of practice shows that modular design can effectively reduce product design time and improve design quality. Therefore, this article explores the use of modular design methods in mold design.

Implementation of mold modular design:

1. Establish a module library

The establishment of the module library has three steps: module division, construction of feature models and the generation of user-defined features. Standard parts are special cases of modules and exist in the module library. The definition of standard parts requires only the last two steps. Module division is the first step in modular design. Whether the module division is reasonable or not directly affects the function, performance and cost of the modular system. The module division of each type of product must go through technical research and repeated demonstrations to arrive at the division result. For molds, functional modules and structural modules are mutually inclusive. The structural module can have large structural changes in the local scope, so it can contain functional modules; and the local structure of the functional module may be relatively fixed, so it can contain structural modules. After the module design is completed, manually construct the feature model of the required module in the Part/Assembly space of Pro/E, and use the user-defined feature function of Pro/E to define two variable parameters of the module: Change the size and assembly relationship to form User-DefinedFeatures (UDFs). Generate user-defined feature files (files with gph suffix) and then name them and store them according to the grouping technique, which completes the establishment of the module library.

2. Development of module library management system

The system realizes the determination of the module through two inferences, structure selection inference and automatic modeling of modules. The first reasoning gets the general structure of the module, and the second reasoning finally determines all the parameters of the module. In this way, the goal of modular plasticity is achieved. In the structure selection reasoning, the system accepts the module name, function parameter and structure parameter input by the user, performs reasoning, and obtains the name of the applicable module in the module library.

If you are not satisfied with the result, the user can specify the name of the module. The module obtained in this step is still uncertain because it lacks the definition of dimensional parameters, accuracy, material characteristics and assembly relations. In automatic modeling and reasoning, the system uses the input size parameters, accuracy characteristics, material characteristics and assembly relationship definitions, drives user-defined feature models, dynamically and automatically constructs modular feature models and automatically assembles them. The automatic modeling function is developed using C language and Pro/E's secondary development tool Pro/TOOLKIT. The mold design can be completed quickly through the call of the module. After applying this system, the mold design cycle is significantly shortened. Since the quality of the module is carefully considered in the module design, it plays a fundamental role in guaranteeing the quality of the mold. What is stored in the module library are mutually independent UDFs files, so this system is extensible.