Week 8 - Challenge 2 - Switch Bezel Design

Aim:

To create the Switch Bezel Plastic component through the given Class-A surface. To begin with, the tooling axis for the given Class-A Surface should be created meeting the requirements of the draft angle and at the end perform the Draft analysis on the model.

• Take the Thickness of the component to be 2.5 mm.

Abstract:

In this project, I design a Switch Bezel using Catia v5. I received input as Class A Surface. I Check the direction to eject the tool based on the component design. Later I checked whether all faces that intersected will clear the direction based on the tooling axis. I started working on the Draft Analysis tool to check if our tooling direction clears the path for easy removal of material from the tool. After that, I go class B creation using Advance tools from the surface followed by class C creation using the sweep command. after design A B C class surface, converting close surface into solid inside the part workbench.

Procedure for creating Tooling Axis ;

1. A Reference Point is created along the Surface zero and new Axis system is created
2. The X Direction along the Class A and Y direction along the Class A were used to create Tooling direction
3. Finally the Tooling axis is created by bisecting the two lines and it is published. Class A Surface as input using surface operation commands Class B is developed.
4. The tooling Axis determines the direction of Class C boundary swept with draft direction.
5. When viewing from tooling direction normal all the parts that are drafted should be visible so it gives an rough idea to determine product manufacturing in Injection molding.

Procedure for B Surface Creation ;

• The next step is to design B surface for the input which is usually the surface where all engineering aspects and support creations are done.
• The B surface Creation is performed using surface operations in CATIA which is an offset from Class A with dimension proportional to the thickness of the part
• In Switch bezel the B surface is offset 2.5mm from the input which is the thickness of the part
• The B surface is an extrapolated surface compared to A surface and forms the bottom skin of the part.

Procedure for C Surface Creation ;

• The Next step is to from the C surface which is an intermediate surface between A and B and is used to give the closed surface appearance to the design
• The C Surface is swept using the profile as boundary line of Class A which is the Guide curve with a subtype along draft direction.
• The Direction of the sweep is the tooling direction formed earlier
• The draft angle for the sweep operation is provided which is 3 Degree and surface is swept for length above the thickness of the specified part
• The C surface is refined using smooth Curve options to remove the complexity and patches along the swept surface
• Finally the Class A and Class C surfaces are joined together and connexity of surfaces should be less than 0.003mm and the surfaces are merged.

VIEW OF BASE BRACKET :

Part Body ;

By using close surface command, convert Solid Model from the final surface.

FINAL PLASTIC COMPONENT :

Draft Analysis ;

The draft analysis will help you quickly gather the draft angle on multiple surfaces manual measurements.The first step is to change your shading style to “Shading with Material”.The next step is to click on the draft analysis icon in the Analysis toolbar.Draft analysis initially assumes a Z axis direction.This can be done with the dragging of the compass with respect to the Tool axis direction.Now that the draft direction is fixed, you can gather the draft angles along different surfaces using the “on the fly” mode. Simply activate the icon within the draft analysis dialogue box and hover your mouse over the surface.using “invert draft direction method” check the color variation in the part and analyze the draft angles in the part.now ok with this position and lock the current orientation.