Application of CAD/CAM in mold design and machining

Abstract

The study for utilizing CAD/CAM/CNC in designing and machining mold has risen for the past decades. The field of water bottle is gigantic and considerably potential around the world. Today, with the development of CAD/CAM software and multi-axis CNC machine, engineers can easily access to the production process and optimize the manufacturing period. The thesis provided a procedure of designing on Solidworks a plastic bottle mold as CAD sample which was designed based on the pragmatic idea and basic theoretical rules in plastic bottle modeling. The CAM programming part has been performed on Mastercam, the process included from the stage of selecting tools to generating the toolpath and simulation. In addition, several prototypes have been manufactured with the CNC machine Haas UMC 750 in order to serve the research. There some limits of the 3-axis milled part have been pointed out. The sample’s surface still shows scallops that can be noticed with human eyes. Due to the shortage of equipment and facilities, the desired model has yet to be created. Keywords: CAD/CAM/CNC, mold, plastic bottle, 3-axis, machining