Automation of mold designs with the reuse of standard parts

► In this study, the automation system of mold design with the reuse of standard parts was developed. The developed system provides methods whereby designers can easily register the master model, which is defined as a function of 3D CAD, as standard parts and effectively reuse standard parts even though they do not recognize the rules of the database. It is expected that the results of this study might be extensible to other products for which design automation through the reuse of standard parts is required. This study has developed an effective reuse and retrieval system that can easily register modeled standard parts using a simple GUI (graphic user interface) even though designers may not know the rules of registration for a complex database. Also, the automatic generation of the optimized parts list has been investigated. The system has been developed in the Windows XP environment using an Open API (application programming interface) and a commercial CAD/CAM/CAE solution. It consists mainly of three kinds of module, i.e., a standard part module, parts-list module, and retrieval-system module. The standard part module is helpful for designers to effectively reuse or modify standard parts after registering them using a GUI. The parts-list module generates a parts list using either standard and/or non-standard parts. The retrieval-system module allows the effective retrieval and classification of standard parts. The system was applied to standardize mold bases and mold parts. It was applied to Hyundai Heavy Industry, S. Korea, which resulted in the reduction of design errors and design time.