Authors: Qiaosheng Liu Juntong Xi Zhuoqi Wu
Publish Date: 2013/04/02
Volume: 68, Issue: 5-8, Pages: 1155-1166
Abstract
Sheet metal parts are widely used in various industry branches The flat pattern development of sheet metal components is a prerequisite for sheet metal fabrication The conventional graphic solution or the analytical method carried out manually is laborious timeconsuming and lacks accuracy The featurebased flattening could help to achieve the objective of automatic pattern generation however it is only suitable for bend formable sheet metal components composed of flat and simple curved surface Inspired by its wide applications in cloth and shoemaking industries the energybased flattening for mesh surface is then introduced into the flat pattern derivation of sheet metal parts in this paper A simplified energy model is proposed as our physical model An innovative energy relaxation process based on variable step size is introduced to promote efficiency Some key issues like seed triangle selection and overlap correction are also concerned For those complex surfaces a hierarchy flattening methodology is proposed to release the flattened distortions A comparison between the energy method and the classic asrigidaspossible mesh parameterization is made to show the effectiveness of our method The numerical experimental results show that the energybased flattening method is a practical intelligent and automatic approach for flat pattern generation of sheet metal components
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