Response prediction of reverse engineered free form surface by design of experiments

Abstract

Reverse engineering is a new technique employed in product design wherein original drawings or pertinent technical data are not available. Reverse engineering technology acquires the conceptual designs from the existing products and consequently creates digital product models. In the product design these digital products are employed with optimization principles. The investigation in this paper encompasses 3-D reconstruction of products by the reverse engineering technique and consequently identifying the deviations between the original product and the reverse engineered model. Design of experiments is a systematic study in the consideration of the governing parameters and there by arriving at the optimization stage. In this investigation response surface methodology method is employed by taking the input parameters viz noise level, smoothing level and triangle count %; and there by identified the responses namely deviation and curvature deviation occurred from the existing physical model. The deviations and curvature deviations are in the range 0.0266 to 0.0621 mm and 0.543 (54.3%) to 0.645 (64.5%) respectively which indicate that the reverse engineered freeform surface is not exhibiting significant difference when compared to the original CAD model. Response surface contours are constructed for determining the optimum process conditions.