Week 8 - Challenge 2 - Switch Bezel Design

Challenge 2 - Switch Bezel Design

Design methodology:

Insert the class A surface of the switch bezel in CATIA software.

Determining the tooling axis for the switch bezel

Creation of class B surface.

Creation of class c surface.

Join the switch bezel's class A, class B, and class c surfaces and ensure all the surfaces are closed surfaces.

Use the Close Surface feature to make a solid body from the surface.

finally, Perform the Draft analysis on the switch bezel final plastic component.

Creating tooling axis:

The ejection from the mold after manufacturing the interior trim must have the nominal 3-degree draft angle.

hence the tooling directions created by considering the above factor and bisecting method is used.

The base surface of the class-A was extracted to create a reference point on the surface using the point, create a line in the z-direction and an axis system was inserted to the point

then using projection intersection along the yz plane is made and the two inclined lines were drawn inside the positioned sketch.

then bisecting lines with the two inclined lines were created.

Bisecting these two lines sketch1 and sketch2 the bisecting line is created and published as a tooling axis.

CLASS-B SURFACE CREATION: divide the class-A surface into 3 different surfaces as shown below.

working on these surfaces one by one we have to follow the same procedure for the 1-bezel rest surface, 2-base, and 3-walls.

The first step is to Extract the surfaces un-trim and extrapolate the surfaces

Offset the surfaces (by measuring the thickness) here the input is given as 3 mm

1-bezel rest surface

2-Base

3-Base

once all the surfaces are created (i.e, bezel rest surface, walls, and base surface). The required trim operations were performed to form a class-B surface

To Perform the fillet operation. Fillet value should be calculated from the Class A surfaces for every edge in the B surface.

The fillet value should be calculated to ensure the component has a uniform thickness.

CLASS-C SURFACE CREATION:

The edges of the Class-A surface are extracted using multiple extracts and then converted into smooth curvature to avoid the patches.

Sweep operation is performed (with draft direction) selecting the smooth curves as the guide curve and tooling axis as the direction and draft angle as 3deg

join class-A and class-C surfaces.

Make sure that there is no unnecessary boundary present, if there is then increase the merging distance to not more than 0.003mm. and even after there is some unwanted boundary, extrapolate class-A by a small distance and trim it with class-c instead of joining them.

Then trim the class-C surface with the class-B surface.

Solving open body problem

After completing the final trim, the body consists of a number of open boundaries (represented by green boundaries) because of which we cannot convert it into a solid body. So, therefore we have to modify our design before converting it into a solid body.

First, we will change the value of the merging distance in the join tool from 0.001mm to 0.003mm. It will modify the open boundary problem.

However, if some boundaries remain unsolved then we have to modify our design to solve this problem.

Final Solid

Draft Analysis

• First the class – A surface is checked before creating the Class –B&C surface and finally the solid body must be analyzed. Both can be done by following the below procedures.
• By changing the view mode to custom view parameters – Material mode then the feature draft analysis is enabled.
• Then the compass was activated and placed with the tooling axis by dragging the red pointer and then locking it.
• Then, by selecting the quick analysis mode, the nominal value will be 3 degrees and checked for the component's draft angle.
• The green color area shows that it satisfies the 3-degree draft angle. If not satisfied then by using the Running point tool the area is measured and then altered to get a successful draft for the created tooling direction.