AUTOMATIC GEOMETRIC RECOGNITION OF WELD BEADS FOR SUPPORTING VIRTUAL PROTOTYPING AND COST ESTIMATION OF WELDING

摘要

Welding is widely used in industry for products made of joined sheet metal parts and beams. The virtual prototyping process of welds in standard CAD systems relies on functionalities to manually add weld beads to the assembly models. Weld beads can be in the form of symbolic annotations or 3D solid representations. The size of products in terms of number of parts and required weld beads makes this process cumbersome and time consuming. This paper presents a method to analyze CAD models of product assemblies in order to automatically identify possible welds among the parts using geometric recognition rules. Adjacent faces are detected and Boolean operators on planar loops are used to identify bead paths. Beads are then split in homogeneous portions based on the topology of the connected parts. The geometrical analysis of the connected parts also allows a bead to be characterized in terms of thickness, type, length and accessibility. Finally, the user is provided with functionalities to edit manufacturing properties or exclude unwanted welds.