Investigation and study of Reverse Engineering and CAD/CAM integration in mold manufacturing

As manufacturers strive to further optimize the development cycles to maintain market competitiveness, the use of reverse engineering technologies have started to play the pivotal role in the product development cycles. Reverse Engineering has become an increasing part of product development process chains resulting in reduced time to market and reduced development costs. Integration of this technology into existing development cycles provides tools to maintain design integrity during development stages as well as between successive product lines. One aspect of Reverse Engineering is the interfacing of data obtained from this technology to various manufacturing processes. This paper discusses about the work carried out at Central Institute of Tool Design to design and manufacture the mold for sculptured part by integrating Reverse Engineering process loop and CADCAM application to optimize the time and cost in real time tool and mold production.