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Background:
The Customer is an O.E.M involed in manufacturing a wide Range of Automotive
Products. Over a period of time, their mold for radiator fan had been
subjected to wear, due to which balancing problems were being faced
during use.
Requirement:
The Company wanted to replace old and damages molds of Radiator Fan.
The Customer wanted to get the 3D Product Model on CAD, with a specific
requirment that all The Fan blades needed to be of exactly the same
profile so as to ensure dynamic balancing.
Implementation Issues:
The Original Mold designs were not available with them. Not even Detailed
drawings of the Fan were available. The only input to the process that
they had was the actual injection molded component from the current
molds. However, since the Component that was used as a reference input
was from the worn out old molds, it was not an accurate representation
of the original model.
Solution:
Our Technical team, after studing the requirment, suggested Reverse
Engineering process for the desired output. The project was carried
out in the following stages, each described below.
1). Digitizing of the Component.
The component was digitized using the touch probe method, by using a
cloud density of 0.8 mm. The output was in form of Point cloud in .iges
format.
2). Building a surface model using I-DEAS Freeform
(Surfacer)
The .iges point cloud was imported into I-DEAS Freeform Surfacer. The
valid usable data was filtered in required tolerance, after which a
3D Surface was built extracting and extrapolating the data. The idea
was to construct all the blades, study the deformations in each, and
arrive at the geometry with desired tolerances.
3). Working on the Surface model to check the Tolerance
accuracy and curvature of surfaces.
To check the tolerance and accuracy, precise tools available with Surfacer
were used to compare the deviations between cloud and constructed surface,
and between surface to surface of the different blades. The Tube-light
checking mehtod available with Surfacer was utilized to check the curvature
quality of the blades.
4). Correcting the deviations and defects of the surface
model to give desired quality surfaces.
After getting the desired inputs, the model was corrected in Surfacer
and the most accurate and closest to desired blade profile was selected
and patterned to create the complete model, so as to ensure dynamic
balancing of the fan.
The surface model was then used to generate the 3D Solid model of the
components. The surface model was taken to I-DEAS Modeler, to generate
other solid features of the fan, and to generate the parting line, core
cavity and Mold bases. The data was then exported to the CAD Systems
used by the customer. The customer had a standalone CAM Package which
they desired to use for CNC Programming.
The I-DEAS Model was exported using the IGES, VDA and STEP Formats.
Project Implementation and Resource Details:
Software used: I-DEAS Surfacer and I-DEAS Modeler.
Digitizing: Renishaw Cyclone Probe digitizer.
Duration (Total Man-Hours): 56 Hours.
Accuracy of the surface model: Postioning continuity 50 Microns.
Tangent continuity of 1 Degree.
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