A Reverse Glue Approach to Automated Construction of Multi-Piece Molds

Mold design can be a difficult, time-consuming process. Determining how to split a cavity into multiple mold pieces (e.g., core, cavity) manually can be a tedious pro This paper focuses on the mold construction step of the automated mold design pr By investigating glue operations and its relations with parting faces, an approach b on a new reverse glue operation is presented. The key to the reverse glue operatio generate parting faces. A problem definition of parting face generation for a regio provided. Correspondingly, three face generating criteria are identified. Based on parting lines of a region, our algorithms to generate the parting faces are presented. mold construction algorithms for two-piece molds and multi-piece molds are also sented with brief discussions. Some industrial examples are provided which illustra efficiency and effectiveness of our approach. We tested our mold designs by fabri stereolithography mold inserts (a rapid tooling method) and molding parts. @DOI: 10.1115/1.1603308 #

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