Recognition of undercut features and parting surface of moulded parts using polyhedron face adjacency graph

Abstract

An injection or die-casting mould is an assembly of parts containing an impression into which molten material is injected. In this article, the undercuts present in mould parts are divided into basically two parts: completely visible and partially visible. A graph-based approach is proposed to identify these undercuts even for the free form objects. Unlike conventional graph based methods a new polyhedron face adjacency graph (PFAG) is proposed with the key concept of visibility of undercuts by using Bezier surface. A rule-based approach is also discussed to automatically generate an optimal parting surfaceof irregular moulded parts. Since the generation of parting surface plays an important and effective role in mould – die design, thus it is essential to develop a simple and robust algorithm based on proposed methodology, which can effectively tackle the problem. Different case studies show that the proposed method can recognize various undercut features without much difficulty.