Simple visualization techniques for die casting part and die design. Final report, July 1, 1995--September 30, 1997

The objective of this work was to develop and test die casting design evaluation techniques based on the visualization of geometric data that is related to potential defects of problems. Specifically, thickness information is used to provide insight into potential thermal problems in the part and die. Distance from the gate and a special type of animation of the fill pattern is used to provide an assessment of gate, vent and overflow locations. Techniques have been developed to convert part design information in the form of STL files to a volume-based representation called a voxel model. The use of STL files makes the process CAD system independent. Once in voxel form, methods that were developed in this work are used to identify thick regions in the part, thin regions in the part and/or die, distance from user specified entry locations (gates), and the qualitative depiction of the fill pattern. The methods were tested with a prototype implementation on the UNIX platform. The results of comparisons with numerical simulation and field reported defects were surprisingly good. The fill-related methods were also compared against short-shots and a water analog study using high speed video. The report contains the results of the testing plus detailed background material on the construction of voxel models, the methods used for displaying results, and the computational geometric reasoning methods used to create die casting-related information from the voxel model for display to the user