A framework for multiple domain feature modeling

Vance William Unruh, Purdue University

Abstract

The aim of concurrent engineering is to improve the quality of engineering designs by bringing together human resources with expertise in many different disciplines. By considering all the aspects of a design, from functionality to manufacturing to maintenance in the early stages of product development, the quality of the end product can be improved and the time to market can be reduced. Everyone involved in the concurrent engineering of a product has a view of the geometry of that product. The stress analyst may view the product as a group of walls, ribs and beams that are subjected to various loadings and constraints while the machinist may view the same product as a collection of pockets, holes and slots that have associated tolerances and surface finishes. A kinematician may ignore the details of the product and view it as an abstract collection of links and connections. The views of the geometry held by the various engineers and analysts all have two things in common. First, they all represent the geometry of the same product even though the geometric models may be vastly different. Second, every dew requires that some engineering data or significance be associated with the geometry before the product can be analyzed. Recent CAD systems, most notably research versions, have included the engineering significance with the geometry by using features. Besides geometry, features include extra information that can aid in design, analysis and manufacturing applications. The first objective of this research is to formulate an environment in which features can be used and maintained in multiple mechanical engineering applications concurrently. The second objective is to support programmers and engineers apart from the software vendor and allow engineering companies to create specialized CAD systems with a relatively small software engineering investment. New applications built using the environment will be able to share geometry and engineering data with other applications that use the environment. The environment is envisioned as an object oriented framework that supports concurrent use of the basic geometric representations used in mechanical engineering. The framework provides two very basic functions, the ability to model mechanical products and the ability to maintain multiple models of that product concurrently. The framework has a sufficiently deep understanding of the basic geometric representations that it is able to convert between representations and maintain relationships between models based on associations between geometric entities in the different models. The framework is extensible so that feature-based applications can use the geometric representations defined in the framework and add the engineering significance appropriate to their domain of interest. Feature-based applications can then share geometric data based on the geometric understanding that is built into the framework.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Anderson, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Mechanical engineering|Computer science

COinS