AN APPROACH TO FIND THE MINIMUM WALL THICKNESS OF A PART FROM ITS B-REP MODEL

Recently, concurrent engineering (CE) has become one of the major conceptual approaches in reducing product developing time. Design for manufacturing (DFM) and design for assembly (DFA) are two of the major areas in CE. Several researchers have integrated a CAD/CAM system and a knowledge-based system to implement DFA and DFM concepts. However, the incompatibility of the data representation methods between CAD/CAM and knowledge-based systems is the major issue in this integration method. In this paper, an approach is proposed to find the minimum wall thickness of a part from its boundary representation (B-Rep) model. These data can then be directly utilized by a knowledge-based system to analyse the manufacturability of thin wall parts such as injection moulded or diecast parts.