Some considerations in the design and automatic staging of progressive dies

Abstract

The process of designing progressive dies is highly complex and has always required the attention of every skilled designers. Various systems have been developed to automate much of hte process with the objective of reducing the complexity and effort needed. This paper reviews these techniques employed and examines, in particular, the level of work done in the area of punch design automation. In general, most systems need the designer to specify the punch shapes either through interactive or graphical input. There have been attempts to automate this but only through restricting the punches to regular shapes. Another objective of this review is to create a system reference model which represents an ideal automated design system for progressive dies. Useful techniques such as knowledge-based tools and heuristic rules that could be used to implement this model will be discussed, using available case studies. © 1992.