A systematic data integration technique for mold-surface polishing processes planning

This paper presents a new MSDI (mold surface data integration) method for presenting ruled mold-surface data for CAPP applications. The method makes use of adjacency and feature-data matrices to establish a framework of feature-based data. The MSDI method enables the storage, retrieval and operations of geometries, topologies, and machining information of a given ruled mold surface. The matrices of adjacency and feature-data effectively represent the relations. Boolean algebra and group technology (GT) methods are introduced to generate the desired process plans. A sample mold made of ruled surfaces is made and used to show the effectiveness of the proposed data representation and the integrated mold surface processing method. A compact computer program is implemented to enhance the speed and accuracy of the MSDI method. The numerical results indicate that the mold surface decomposition and integration procedure presented in this paper are systematic and effective. The paper provides a novel modular mold surface modeling tool and procedure that can be further extended to accommodate more features appearing in complicated ruled mold surfaces.