Research on virtual assembly platform of virtual machine tools

Based on virtual reality technology, virtual manufacturing (VM) is an essential realization to practical manufacturing. VM is playing a more and more important role in modern manufacturing Field. It can help manufacturing enterprises to accomplish the goal of producing quality products in smaller batches, shorter lead times and with a greater variety efficiently. This paper studies the hierarchical architecture and the key technologies of virtual assembly platform for virtual machine tools (VAPVMT), and establishes several abstract classes of virtual assembly for general machine tool (including lathe, milling machine, grinding machine etc.). With the aid of these basic classes and the object-oriented method, a new machine tool can be constructed easily and rapidly. Some software development kits, Such as visual C++ and Open Inventor, are used to implement the VAPVMT. This system affords us the opportunity to develop some important simulation functions including virtual assembling, virtual Cutting, and Simulations of the cutter's temperature and stress field. In this paper, two application instances are provided, which are the CK6430 machine tool produced by Shanghai machine tool factory and the QZ104 cutting paper machine produced by Shenweida Co. Finally, the direction of further study is also brought forward, i.e. each function of VAPVMT will be encapsulated as a service that can be used in Manufacturing Grid, whose Peal is to ensure users distributed in different positions to commonly share distributed resources, information, and data in essential.