Yoonhwan Woo
The Journal of Mechanical Science and Technology, vol. 23, no. 7, pp.1939-1948, 2009

Abstract : Although solid models can represent complex and detailed geometry of parts, it is often necessary to simplify solid models by removing the detailed geometry in some applications such as finite element analysis and similarity assessment of CAD models. There are no standards for judging the goodness of a simplification method, but one essential criterion would be that it should generate a consistent and acceptable simplification for the same solid model, regardless of how the solid model has been created. Since a design-feature-based approach is tightly dependent on modeling sequences and designer’s modeling preferences, it sometimes produces inconsistent and unacceptable simplifications. In this paper, a new method is proposed to simplify solid models of machined parts. Independently of user-specified design features, this method directly recognizes and generates subtractive features from the final model of the part, and then simplifies the solid model by removing the detailed geometry by using these subtractive features.

Keyword : History independency; Level of detail; Solid model simplification; Volume decomposition