Conception of Part Reconstruction: Integration of Non-Contact Scanning and Rapid Prototyping

Today, modern manufacturing era is characterized by wide spread use of remanufacturing process in order to eliminate waste and contribute towards green manufacturing. The reengineering process can be carried out on damaged or worn out spare parts through an effective integration of reverse engineering and rapid prototyping approach. The integrated approach helps in considerable time reduction for product development during the re-design and re-manufacturing phases. Further, it becomes the need of an hour to assimilate the reverse engineering and rapid prototyping approach to facilitate the longer life cycle of the redesigned products. Reverse engineering initiates from scanning of physical model and generating 3D scanned model with the objective of generating part-to-CAD model and then CAD-to-part model using rapid prototyping for reconstruction of any object. In the present work, a single point cutting tool has been selected for the effective demonstration of this integrated approach. The selection is due to its complex geometry and it is also considered to be an imperative element in cutting tool industries. The methodology initiates with scanning of tool and subsequently saving scanned data into STL and point cloud data format. Using these data files a re-generate prototype model is constructed. Prior to this, various steps such as data acquisition, data pre-processing, profile generation, file formatting have been performed. The paper demonstrates the purposed methodology by creating prototype tool geometry for a single cutting point tool. Finally some practical limitations from manufacturing point of view has been highlighted and discussed.