Development of an automated structural design system for progressive dies

The design of progressive dies is a very knowledge-intensive, complex, and time-consuming process. This paper describes a computer-aided structural design system for progressive dies with drawing, bending, and punching operations. Taking advantage of a pre-built design knowledge and database, this system is able to output designs of the main and standard parts of a progressive die upon users inputting a minimum set of design information. Our system is implemented on top of CATIA V5 software and uses its built-in modules, including Part Design, Assembly Design, and Knowledge Advisor. Our system also consists of an inference engine and a user interface. The experimental results show that our system successfully reduced the design time from about seven working days to within 2 h for the structural design of the main and standard parts of a progressive die of an upper shell for a mobile phone, which can dramatically save on design time and cost and also provide excellent design quality.