Company: 3DRE Laser Scanning Services Ltd.
Location: Vancouver British Columbia
Software: Geomagic Design and Control X
Hardware: Kscan magic 2
Client: Dependable Industries
The Challenge: Generate a casting model from existing patterns and core boxes for metal flow simulation and post cast inspection. No drawings or existing CAD data is available.
The Solution: Utilize a handheld scanner and Geomagic Design X and Control X to generate the mesh body and perform inspection.
This project was very unique as we had a customer who had a pattern and core box set that produced a casting of a volute case, they were interested in how that potential casting would compare to the actual casting that was produced and how that potential casting would flow using a Casting Flow Analysis program.
Since there were no CAD models of this pattern equipment set we had to get the data! So we started this project scanning the core box surfaces and generate the mesh of each resultant.
We then assembled the data using the advanced Alignment tools in Design X.
Why do we use Design X? Because it allows us to align raw scan data to a standard origin use mirror commands and the defeature commands allow us to remove the risers from the scan data to get the mold cavity. Then we can align the scan data sets to each other very quickly and accurately.
In Design X we decimate the high density data to reduce the poly-face count but keep all the high curvature resolution intact. After that we used the Auto surface command to generate solids and Boolean the parts to generate the resultant sand block that would be made. Once we had the data of each component we could subtract those features to generate the hollow casting that would be manufactured. This was then exported as a mesh to go into the mold flow analysis program.
Later once the casting was produced we could then use the shrink standard for the metal used on the mold cavity data we generated and compare that to a new scan of the actually casting and then performed a comparison report using Geomagic Control X .
