Abstract
Recently three-dimensional (3-D) die design and production process has been widely introduced into the tooling shops of automotive manufacturers to reduce time-to-production of brand-new automobiles. 3-D solid models created in CAD systems are used not only for various simulations for design verification, but also for NC tool path generation to machine dies and their Styrofoam patterns. However, a lot of time and cost will be required to build solid models for dies if designers use only the generalized modeling capabilities of commercial 3-D CAD systems. To solve this problem, it is necessary to customize 3-D CAD system for the specific die design and manufacturing process. This paper describes a dedicated 3-D CAD system based on Unigraphics for die design for automotive body panels. The system provides not only 3-D design capabilities, but also standard part libraries, to enhance design productivity. The design process modeling technology has been introduced to facilitate redesign of the die for the modified panel. By introducing this system, dies can be designed more rapidly in the 3-D space, and their solid data can be directly transferred to CAM tools for NC tool path generation and simulation tools for virtual manufacturing.
