Sustainable Reverse Engineering Methodology Assisting 3D Modeling of Footwear Safety Metallic Components

One main objective of the technique of reverse engineering is focused on development of new products based on the improvement of existing products. The present work aims to demonstrate a sustainable methodology exploring the capabilities of reverse engineering, applied to produce brand new geometric solutions for safety metallic components incorporated in footwear. The data acquisition is done using different techniques, contact methods (CMM – Measuring Coordinate Machine) and non-contact methods (Laser Scanning). Those measuring techniques for data acquisition are the key entry for the 3D shape recovery, boosting the development of new components based on the improvement of existing products. Despite these techniques being widely explored in multiple engineering sectors, author’s contribute was focused on the proposal and validation of a sustainable methodology based on an algorithm in MATLAB that performs the surface generation under user control. Such methodology has been tested through a real model of a toecap component used in safety footwear.Copyright © 2013 by ASME