AN ADVISOR SYSTEM FOR PRELIMINARY MOLD DESIGN

Abstract

Mold design is the first and most crucial mold manufacturing activity. It is also the least structured. It relies greatly on the mold designer's expertise, judgment, and use of heuristics. A preliminary mold design stage is first considered. In this stage, a mold designer has to be well versed in the different aspects of the mold structure. Traditionally, mold design knowledge is experience based, and could have significant influence on the details of a particular mold design. This thesis reports an integrated mold design system called "Product Advisor" which can provide different types of advice that mold designers would need. All this knowledge is necessary for a designer to achieve a fast and good mold design. The input of this system is the product model from a product designer. This geometry model will be converted into a knowledge model by this system. The "Product Advisor" system consists multiple types of analysis tools to provide different kind of knowledge information. Furthermore, a new automatic approach to search for main mold design parameters is introduced in this thesis. This automatic search method is based on a new model called discrete model in this system. The information containing parting line, undercut and draft angle is extracted automatically form the model using this method.