Decomposition of complex models for manufacturing

This work presents a feature recognition (FR) technique that separates protrusions bounded by freeform surface geometry. The method can also generate complementary male/female assembly features at the interface between components. A heuristic that uses edge curvature continuity is applied to direct the search and the construction of protrusion boundaries. The result is represented as a cellular model. The objective is to manufacture complex prototype assemblies on multiaxis machining centres. After describing the algorithm and presenting some examples of its application the paper concludes by discussing the approach's limitations.