Fig。 1。 To implement each task, some injection mould objects need to be determined using the knowledge base。 Consider, for example, the feeding system design task in

the detailed mould design。 Some injection mould objects such as runners and gates are to be defined。 The detailed runner design has a set of design solutions that can be

applied; for example, runner types can be circular or trapezoid。

3。3。2 The library

The IKB-MOULD also has useful libraries that support the injection mould design module。 Three types of libraries are the material library, the mouldbase/components library and the tool library。 The material library stores the detailed material properties and the shrinkage rates of 38 different materials。 The mouldbase/components library stores all standard mouldbases and other components used in the detailed mould design。 The tool library is reserved mainly for automatic NC code generation and to store tooling information such as feed rate and speed。 All libraries can be expanded to meet the user’s requirements。文献综述

4 A case study

So far, the detailed mould design modules have been presented in the previous section。 In the IKB-MOULD, the implementation of those modules is realised in a commercial 3D solid modelling environment—Solid- Designer。 SolidDesigner provides a user-friendly API。 Using this API, an intelligent and interactive design environment for injection mould design is developed。 There are many useful menus, tool buttons, dialogues

and commands。

Figure 2 shows a plastic product。 With the help of the intelligent and interactive tools provided by the IKBMOULD, an injection mould is designed to mould this

plastic product。 Mould specification is done during the initial mould design。 Figure 3 shows the mould specification of this product。 The material used is Zenite。 Using the material library, the relative shrinkage rate in three directions is recommended to reconstruct the product model to account for material shrinkage during the mould operation。 Some other mould information, such as the mould base, the number of cavities, the mould size, etc。, can be found in the mould specification。 The critical design in an injection mould lies in the core/cavity insert。 Due to the complicated structure of the product, there are many inserts in the core and the cavity。 Figure 4 shows the designed core and cavity inserts。 The designed core inserts with the product are displayed on the left side and the designed cavity inserts are displayed on the right side of Fig。 4。Figure 5 shows the final designed mould in the entire IKB-MOULD environment。 The left window shows the assembly tree of the injection mould design。 This assembly tree lists the mould base, inserts (core and cavity inserts), tools (including feeding and cooling systems) and standard elements (including ejector pins)。 The assembly tree is automatically generated from the injection mould objects’ relationship based on the proposed object representation。 The entire mould can be viewed in whole or in part by selecting the visibility button of each injection mould object in the assembly tree。 The final design injection mould base moving half is displayed in the current IKB-MOULD environment。 The middle window in Fig。 5 shows the designed core inserts fitted into the standard moving half of the mould base late。 The designed cavity inserts are fitted into the mould base fixed half。 Ongoing work is being performed for the IKB-MOULD to develop many useful tools that generate 2D engineering drawings from the designed injection mould。 Figure 6 shows the final 2D drawing of one of the core inserts。 Figure 7 shows the assembly 2D drawing of the designed mould with the BOM。 All 2D drawings for the injection mould can be automatically generated based on the designed 3D mould in the IKBMOULD。

5 Conclusions and future work

This paper presents an intelligent and interactive injection mould design system。 Based on the analysis of the injection mould design process, the representation of the mould design and the integration of an intelligent and interactive environment have to be solved to provide a better injection mould design system。 An IKB-MOULD is developed accordingly。 The IKB-MOULD integrates the knowledge representation with many developed tools in a commercial solid modelling software environment。