Reverse engineering and CAD modeling.

What is reverse engineering?

Reverse Engineering, is a process that is used to create 3D CAD models directly from physical parts with little or no additional design documentation. By scanning (digitizing) items that have insufficient design documentation or require CAD data for modern manufacturing methods, a component can be quickly and accurately reverse engineered. Similarly, Re-Engineering is usually undertaken in order to redesign a product for better manufacturability, or to take advantage of modern materials and manufacturing practices.

How is Reverse Engineering useful?

In many cases it is extremely difficult (if not impossible) to clearly define physical part geometry using traditional measurement techniques. It is easy to see why Digitizing has become an essential tool in the Reverse Engineering process. Reverse Engineering quickly and accurately bridges the gap between poorly or un-documented tooling and fully modifiable 3D CAD models useful for modern manufacturing methods

What can be expected?

The scanned data is used as a visual reference to create surfaces that are recognized by industry standard design packages. These surfaces can be further re-created in a fully parametric format. Once a solid model has been created, a limitless number of editing / modifying tasks can be performed for anything as simple as prototyping, to tooling for full scale production.

How are Business Goals Affected?

3D CAD models are the industry standard communication tool for manufacturing and design. By converting physical parts to CAD format, efficiencies can be realized in areas such as product development, manufacturing technology, enterprise communication, market evaluation, and, time to market. The incorporation of concept and market trend designs is greatly simplified by this process.

The Process:

Sample parts and drawings (if available) are provided. The part or object is digitized. The data is refined and used as a foundation for creating one of the various 3D file types available.

Prototype models are made for design confirmation. Additional models can be painted and decorated for market evaluation purposes.

What are the benefits of reverse engineering?

Manufacturers can use modern molding technologies on legacy parts. Creates documentation for a part where none existed before or documentation that is up to date.

Quickly captures the design intent of a part and reduces the amount of time in product design cycle.

What is a deliverable file formats from a reverse engineering project?

Parametric Solid models and Assemblies Non-parametric Solid model and Assemblies

Reverse Engineering Overview

Data Processing for Rapid Prototyping

Rapid prototyping (RP) is a nonconventional fabrication process that builds parts layerby-layer. The use of RP can significantly reduce prototyping time and also the impact of the geometric complexity of the part on the fabrication process. It has been widely used in industry recently for prototype making, mechanism interference checking, conceptual design, and rapid tooling. Although many RP systems, such as stereo lithography apparatus (SLA), fused deposition modeling (FDM), and selective laser sintering (SLS), are available on the market, the basic difference among these technologies is the methods by which the materials are processed. The underlying principle for the data processing of most RP systems is the same: slicing the 3-D part CAD model into 2-D layers. The slicing process generally begins with a given 3-D CAD model in the STL format (CAD models in other formats, e.g., NURBS, need to be converted into the STL format first). It cuts the 3-D model into layers to obtain a layer-based model, each layer represented by a 2-D contour and its thickness. The simplest method is to use a constant thickness for all layers, but the shape errors (stair-case error) vary due to changes in the surface geometry. To meet the given shape-error tolerance, the layer with the minimum thickness must be used for all layers. This will make RP fabrication inefficient. Therefore, adaptive slicing has become a keen research topic Because the mid-1990s (Dolenc and Mkel1994; Kulkarni and Dutta 1995; Sabourin et al. 1997; Tyberg and Bohn 1998;Lin 2001). The adaptive slicing technique determines the minimum number of layers required under the given shape-error bound.

CAD model preparation

The first step in the CFD/CAE process corresponds to the definition of a solution domain in the form of suitable CAD model. Any problems ignored at this stage will be therefore carried downstream, and for this reason it is critical to ensure the CAD is correct. This stage can be divided into two processes: the construction or retrieval of CAD data and the subsequent preparation and cleaning of this data for analysis purposes. ICON has extensive experience in handling industrial CAD data assemblies for both of these processes. Furthermore, advice is offered on related subjects like best practices for CAD to CFD process for customers who are faced with the following situations: 1. No CAD data available 2. Partial/Incomplete/pre-treated data available 3. Complete raw CAD data assembly available Our expertise includes:
1. 2. 3. 4.

CAD construction CAD cleaning/correction CAD preparation CAD translation