This paper presents a novel CAD feature recognition approach for thin-walledinjection moulded and cast parts in which moulding features are recognised froma mid-surface abstraction of the part geometry. The motivation for the researchhas been to develop techniques to help designers of moulded parts to incorporatemanufacturing considerations into their designs early in the design process. Themain contribution of the research has been the development of an attributed mid-surface adjacency graph to represent the mid-surface topology and geometry, anda feature recognition methodology for moulding features. The conclusion of theresearch is that the mid-surface representation provides a better basis forfeature recognition for moulded parts than a B-REP solid model. A demonstratorthat is able to identify ribs, buttresses, bosses, holes and wall junctions hasbeen developed using C++, with data exchange to the CAD system implemented usingISO 10303 STEP. The demonstrator uses a commercial algorithm (I-DEAS) to createthe mid-surface representation, but the feature recognition approach is genericand could be applied to any mid-surface abstraction. The software has beentested on a range of simple moulded parts and found to give good results.
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