Decomposition of complex models for manufacturing: Proceedings - Shape Modeling International SMI 2004

This paper 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 novel 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 multi-axis machining centres. After describing the algorithm and presenting some examples of its application the paper concludes by discussing the approaches limitations.