A New Metric for Evaluating Machinability of a Design

With the increasing complexity of part model designs and the pressure to reduce time to market, evaluating the manufacturability of conceptual designs can help design engineers avoid part features that create downstream manufacturing problems. For machining processes, reachability of a part surface with a cutting tool plays a major role in determining the machinability of a design. This paper describes a new method to quantify reachability at different locations on the surface of a part model. A mesh representation (STL file) is generated for a part model and a slicing algorithm is used to estimate the reachability for each model facet. A new metric was derived to provide an overall measure of a part model’s reachability. The results of our analysis of three part models are presented along with a discussion of the implications of the new metric for design