An investigation on the surface finish of sculptured surface utilizing reverse engineering data of crank case cover – (CATIA V5 & DELCAM)

Abstract

The ultimate aim of this study was to investigate the effect of surface finish for a machined part which was programmed by two popular Computer Aided Design / Computer Aided Manufacturing (CAD/CAM) software namely as Catia V5 and Delcam (Delcam for Solidworks - DFS) by using scanned data obtained from one of the Reverse Engineering methods namely Three-Dimensional (3D) scanning process. A crank case cover was chosen as the physical part to be scanned and machined because of its sculptured shape and complex geometry. In this study, simultaneous three-axis machining programs were created and machined using threeaxis Computer Numerical Control (CNC) Milling machine; DMC 635 Ecoline. Furthermore, all machining parameters are remained the same for both programs. Initially, the physical crank case cover gone through the first process called scanning process using a 3D scanner; model 700 CX in order to capture the 3D CAD data in points cloud form. The raw scanned data then gone through editing process to obtain better surfaces using Geomagic Studio software. Moreover, the stable and edited CAD model then undergone CAD/CAM programming process for both mentioned software respectively. On the other hand, there were seven random points chosen to be analyzed for the surface roughness analysis. The arithmetic mean value (Ra) was used as the roughness value reference using Mitutoyo Surface Tester. Ultimately, it could be concluded that Catia V5 producing better surface finish compared to Delcam software concluded from the analysis carried out as presented in this paper.