Determination of Mold Parting Direction Based on Automatic Molding Feature Recognition

Abstract

Abstract Mold parting direction is an important factor to verify the moldability of a molded part. The determination of mold parting direction is the first step to achieve automatic design of an injection mold or a casting die. A method using automatic feature recognition is proposed in this paper to automatically determine parting direction of an injection mold. Parting direction determination of a molded part consists of three steps in our approach. First, all features of a molded part are recognized using a universal hint-based feature recognition algorithm, and all candidate and feasible parting directions of each feature are determined according to the type of the feature. Then, all candidate parting directions of the molded part are automatically generated from all recognized features candidate parting directions. The optimal parting direction is finally chosen based on certain criteria. The case studies on several industrial parts show that the proposed method is effective and efficient in determining the optimal parting direction of injection molded parts.