Research team in Engineering, Innovation and Management of Industrial Systems, Mechanical Engineering Department, Faculty of Sciences and Technics, Abdelmalek Essaadi University Tangier, Morocco
Automatic Feature Recognition (AFR) has played a crucial role linking Computer Aided Design (CAD) activities and Computer Aided Process Planning (CAPP) activities. For the purpose, many methods have been developed to recognize form features from CAD files, taking into account features interactions. Among one of the most efficient approaches that can handle features interactions is the Cell-based volume decomposition approach. However, on the one hand, this method suffers from computational combinatorial explosions when multiple interpretations of sets to remove volumetric features from a same part are generated. On the other hand, not all interpretations are rational from a machining point of view in the real manufacturing environment. This paper describes a new approach to eliminate the undesirable interpretations of features, according to manufacturing rules and metal removal principals. A Features Suppression system is elaborated, and which consists in adding or removing material rings matching to some volumetric features of the part. By this way, the part and the stock are modified, and the number of interacting features that are used to generate multiple interpretations of features is remarkably reduced. A simple example part has been processed through this paper to validate the approach.