Parametric and Automatic Navigation Process for Electrode Design

In the mold design process the electrode is designed in advance for a contour requiring high accuracy or for a complex contour. The mold material, fixture specification, and the working ability of electrical discharge machine are all considered in the design process; otherwise, there will be inaccurate positioning and poor machining accuracy. Therefore, to increase mold machining accuracy, the information of design and manufacturing stages must be integrated in order to prevent the design and manufacturing planning stages from mistakes, to solve problems, and to transfer information to the manufacturing stage effectively. In this study the redevelopment of the navigation process for electrode design of electrical discharge machining (EDM) is based on a computer-aided design (CAD) software, under the concept of design for manufacturing (DFM). The regions requiring EDM are listed for the engineer by using the feature recognition method according to the feature specifications. The machine working ability and material information integrated in the process can guarantee the manufacturability of electrode design, reduce the error rate of electrode design, and shorten the design time by over 70%.