A study on automated design system for a blow mould

Abstract

Designing a blow mould is a very complicated and knowledge-intensive process. This paper describes a feature-based, parametric-based, and knowledge-based design system for drawing blow moulds that requires only a minimum set of parameters to be set before it completes the design of the main parts of an injection, blow, and eject mould. This blow mould design system, implemented on top of the Powershape CAD, consists of a machine type and cavity setting module, an injection designer, a blow designer, an eject designer, mould design creation module, moulding database, and machine database. Through these modules, the mould designers are able to create a 3D blow mould design from customer requirements. This system is capable of reducing the lead-time of blow mould design as it integrates the three stages (injection, blow, eject) of the blow mould design process and can greatly improve the product quality through a standardization of the design process. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.