Parts in CATIA Based on Reverse Engineering Technique

Abstract

Increasing diversity of the products has led to the need of decreasing the design and manufacturing time. Subsequently, an important factor in reducing the design time is to produce parts families from the approached product components. This paper aims to present a method of achieving parts family starting from an iconic model of an existing product, without technical documentation. Firstly the Reverse Engineering (RE) technique is used, because it allows the digitization of the existing product using the 3D scanning equipments. This method supposes dividing the cloud of points, previously obtained, into independent components. Each component identified would be influenced by parameters with default values. This entire stage of parameterization is performed using CATIA software package. Using these components the parts family of the studied product is designed. The aim of the parameterization is to obtain a wide range of components, of various shapes and dimensions, once with the modification of the parameters that define them. Also, in this paper, will be presented a case study to highlight parts family resulted from the parameterized components, for a product belonging to the entertainment industry category.