Progressive Education Society's

Modern College of Engineering

Department of Mechanical Engineering

SE. Mechanical Engineering- 2019 pattern

Solid Modeling and Drafting
Practical No 4.- Reverse Engineering using Point Cloud Data

Name:____________________________________________
Roll Number:_______________________________________
Division:__________________________________________
Exam Seat No.:_____________________________________
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In many areas of industry, it is desirable to develop products by digitizing
conceptual clay models.
This is also referred as reverse engineering of shape/ shape synthesis from
digitized point cloud.
Reverse Engineering is the process of producing design details in the form of CAD
model from the physical part. The process consists of first scanning the object
concerned to create a point cloud that represents the skin of the object. Then using
a CAD Software such as SURFACER the skin i.e. the surface model of the object
is created. The surface model thus created is exported to a Solid modeling package
such as I-DEAS where the surface model is checked for water tight geometry and
after modification if necessary, the solid model is generated. The solid model thus
created can be then used for analysis, documentation, NC code generation or for
prototyping.
APPLICATION:
Copy of part- when we have no original design.
Existing part - for analysis and modification.
Aesthetic design - wooden or clay model is first conceptualized.
Custom fits for human surfaces - helmets, shoes, space suits or prostheses.
Manufacturing.
Inspection and quality control.
Art & Sculpting
STEPS:
Data Acquisition
Preprocessing
Segmentation and Surface Fitting
CAD Model creation (By F.D. Machine- 3D-Printing)
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What Is Reverse Engineering?
Engineering is the process of designing, manufacturing, assembling, and
maintaining products and systems. There are two types of engineering, forward
engineering and reverse engineering. Forward engineering is the traditional process
of moving from high-level abstractions and logical designs to the physical
implementation of a system. In some situations, there may be a physical part/
product without any technical details, such as drawings, bills-of-material, or
without engineering data. The process of duplicating an existing part, subassembly,
or product, without drawings, documentation, or a computer model is known as
reverse engineering. Reverse engineering is also defined as the process of
obtaining a geometric CAD model from 3-D points acquired by scanning/
digitizing existing parts/products.
The process of digitally capturing the physical entities of a component, referred to
as reverse engineering (RE), is often defined by researchers with respect to their
specific RE as, “the basic concept of producing a part based on an original or
physical model without the use of an engineering drawing”.
RE is defined as the “process of retrieving new geometry from a manufactured part
by digitizing and modifying an existing CAD model”.. In some situations, such as
automotive styling, designers give shape to their ideas by using clay, plaster, wood,
or foam rubber, but a CAD model is needed to manufacture the part. As products
become more organic in shape, designing in CAD becomes more challenging and
there is no guarantee that the CAD representation will replicate the sculpted model
exactly. Reverse engineering provides a solution to this problem because the
physical model is the source of information for the CAD model. This is also
referred to as the physical-to-digital process.
Another reason for reverse engineering is to compress product development cycle
times. Rapid product development (RPD) refers to recently developed technologies
and techniques that assist manufacturers and designers in meeting the demands of
shortened product development time. For example, injection-molding companies
need to shorten tool and die development time drastically. By using reverse
engineering, a three-dimensional physical product or clay mock-up can be quickly
captured in the digital form, remodeled, and exported for rapid prototyping/tooling
or rapid manufacturing using multi-axis CNC machining techniques.
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Why Use Reverse Engineering?
Following are some of the reasons for using reverse engineering:
The original manufacturer no longer exists, but a customer needs the product, e.g.,
aircraft spares required typically after an aircraft has been in service for several
years.
The original manufacturer of a product no longer produces the product, e.g., the
original product has become obsolete.
The original product design documentation has been lost or never existed. •
Creating data to refurbish or manufacture a part for which there are no CAD data,
or for which the data have become obsolete or lost.
Inspection and/or Quality Control–Comparing a fabricated part to its CAD
description or to a standard item.
Some bad features of a product need to be eliminated e.g., excessive wear might
indicate where a product should be improved

Phase 1–Scanning
This phase is involved with the scanning strategy–selecting the correct scanning
technique, preparing the part to be scanned, and performing the actual scanning to
capture information that describes all geometric features of the part such as steps,
slots, pockets, and holes. Three-dimensional scanners are employed to scan the
part geometry, producing clouds of points, which define the surface geometry.
These scanning devices are available as dedicated tools or as add-ons to the
existing computer numerically controlled (CNC) machine tools. There are two
distinct types of scanners, contact and noncontact.
Contact Scanners- These devices employ contact probes that automatically follow
the contours of a physical surface . However, depending on the size of the part
scanned, contact methods can be slow because each point is generated sequentially
at the tip of the probe. Tactile device probes must deflect to register a point; hence,
a degree of contact pressure is maintained during the scanning process. This
contact pressure limits the use of contact devices because soft, tactile materials
such as rubber cannot be easily or accurately scanned.
Noncontact Scanners- A variety of noncontact scanning technologies available on
the market capture data with no physical part contact. Noncontact devices use
lasers, optics, and charge-coupled device (CCD) sensors to capture point data.
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Although these devices capture large amounts of data in a relatively short space of
time, there are a number of issues related to this scanning technology.
• The typical tolerance of noncontact scanning is within ±0.025 to 0.2mm.
• Some noncontact systems have problems generating data describing surfaces,
which are parallel to the axis of the laser.
• Noncontact devices employ light within the data capture process. This creates
problems when the light impinges on shiny surfaces, and hence some surfaces must
be prepared with a temporary coating of fine powder before scanning.
Phase 2–Point Processing
The output of the scanning phase is point cloud data sets in the most convenient
format. Typically, the RE software provides a variety of output formats such as
raw (X, Y, Z values separated by space or commas).
This phase involves importing the point cloud data, reducing the noise in the data
collected, and reducing the number of points. These tasks are performed using a
range of predefined filters. It is extremely important that the users have very good
understanding of the filter algorithms so that they know which filter is the most
appropriate for each task. This phase also allows us to merge multiple scan data
sets. Sometimes, it is necessary to take multiple scans of the part to ensure that all
required features have been scanned. This involves rotating the part; hence each
scan datum becomes very crucial. Multiple scan planning has direct impact on the
point processing phase. Good datum planning for multiple scanning will reduce the
effort required in the point processing phase and also avoid introduction of errors
from merging multiple scan data. The output of the point processing phase is a
clean , merged, point cloud data set in the most convenient format. This phase also
supports most of the proprietary formats mentioned above in the scanning phase.
The output PCD file for a 3d scanned teapot is as shown as an example. This can
be processed by a CAD software to make it parametric.
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