A method to divide mechanical parts into machinable parts

摘要

In recent years, solid modelers have been introduced to CAD systems. Although these have simplified the design process if the designed mechanical parts are difficult to be machined, they must be redesigned by changing their shapes or dividing them into machinable parts. This can be a difficult and time consuming operation. In this paper we propose a method to automatically divide the solid models of mechanical parts into machinable parts. The number of the machinable parts can be minimized regardless of the complexity of the shapes of the mechanical parts.