The Effect of Surface Finish on Sculptured Shape Utilizing Scanned Data-Reversed Engineering (CATIA V5 & DELCAM)

Abstract

The ultimate aim of this study was to investigate the effect of surface finish for a machined part which was programmed by two popular CAD/CAM software namely Catia V5 and Delcam using scanned data obtained from one of the Reverse Engineering methods namely Three-Dimensional (3D) scanning process. A gaming mouse was chosen as the physical part to be scanned and machined because of its sculptured shape and wavy looks. In this study, simultaneous three-Axis machining programs were created and machined using three-Axis Computer Numerical Control (CNC) Milling machine. Initially, the physical gaming mouse gone through the first process called scanning process using a 3D scanner; model 700 CX in order to capture the 3D CAD data in points cloud form. The raw scanning data then gone through editing process to obtain better surfaces. Moreover, the stable and edited CAD model then undergone CAD/CAM programming process for both mentioned software respectively. There were ten random points chosen to be analyzed for the surface roughness analysis. The arithmetic mean value (Ra) was used as the roughness value reference. The results reveal that the average surface roughness for the ten points was 0.232 μm for Catia V5 whilst for Delcam was around 0.274 μm. Ultimately, Catia V5 producing better surface finish compared to Delcam software concluded from the analysis carried out as presented in this paper.