Automatically extracting sheet-metal features from solid model

With the development of modern industry, sheet-metal parts in mass production have been widely applied in mechanical, communication, electronics, and light industries in recent decades; but the advances in sheet-metal part design and manufacturing remain too slow compared with the increasing importance of sheet-metal parts in modern industry. This paper proposes a method for automatically extracting features from an arbitrary solid model of sheet-metal parts; whose characteristics are used for classification and graph-based representation of the sheet-metal features to extract the features embodied in a sheet-metal part. The extracting feature process can be divided for valid checking of the model geometry, feature matching, and feature relationship. Since the extracted features include abundant geometry and engineering information, they will be effective for downstream application such as feature rebuilding and stamping process planning.