Thermoforming mould design using a reverse engineering approach

Thermoforming is commonly used to produce shaped plastic sheets for packaging consumer products. The conventional method of designing and making thermoforming moulds is laborious and time consuming. A method based on a reverse engineering approach and thermoforming feature concept is proposed. The method involves the use of a self-developed device to digitise the surface of a product. A CAD model that corresponds to the thermoforming mould of the product is then constructed by using the digitised data. The construction of the mould surface is based on the concept of a defined set of thermoforming mould features. A modified Laplacian smoothing technique is applied to process the digitised data for generating the thermoforming mould surfaces. Several examples are used to explain the working principle and demonstrate the viability of the proposed method.