Abstract
In the current manufacturing practice, injection molding is widely used for fabricating plastic parts of various consumer products, such as digital cameras, printers and other electric appliances. In designing a plastic part, thickness of the part is defined to be constant all over the surface, otherwise some deformations happen in the molding process which deteriorate the aesthetic quality of the product. In this paper, the authors propose a fast algorithm for evaluating the thickness of the solid model. Existing commercial CAD systems provide some thickness measuring functions of solid models. These functions are, however, not appropriate for evaluating thickness of the complex shape. In this paper, a new definition of the thickness of the solid model is proposed. Using the definition, a fast thickness evaluation algorithm with the oriented bounding box (OBB) and the parallel processing capability of GPU is developed. A system is implemented and some computational experiments are performed.
