Development of New Rapid Prototyping System Performing both Deposition and Machining (II)

Abstract

The necessity of using rapid prototyping(RP) for short-run manufacturing is continuously driving a development of a cost-effective technique that will produce completely-finished quality parts in a very short time. To meet these demands, the improvements in production speed, accuracy, materials, aid cost are crucial. Thus, a new hybrid-RP system performing both deposition and in a station is proposed. For the new hybrid RP process to maintain the same degree of process automation as in currently available processes like SLA or FDNI, a sophisticated process planning system is developed. In the process planner, CAD models(STEP AP203) are partitioned into 3D manufacturable volumes called 'Ueposition feature segment(DFS) after features called machining feature segmenf'(MFS) are extracted from the initial CAD model. Once MFS and DFS are identified, the process planner arranges them into a chain of processes and automatically generates information for each DFS and MFS. The goal of this paper is to present a framework for a process planning system for hybrid RP processes and to outline the geometric algorithms involved in developing such an environmentnvironment