A Triangulation-Based Method for Complex Mold Parts Surface Wear Assessment

This work concerns the assessment of mold parts with multi-view scanning point cloud data. With the soaring demand for complex geometry parts, multi-axis electrical discharge machining (EDM) manufacturing also faces the challenge of high-cost and the requirement of high-accuracy. As a part of EDM, well-judged life-time and wear condition of mold parts are critical to ensuring product quality. In this work, we present a novel non-contact surface inspection solution for mold part 3D reconstruction and inspection based on light-section scanning. After calibration and registration, multi-view stereo (MVS) point cloud data for the parts can be obtained, which can then be used to generate 2D section profiles. Comparison method is designed to examine if the design tolerance is met by comparing the section profiles against those based on the CAD model of the parts. Our method is verified by assessing worn electrode parts, which are commonly used in machining centers. The method proposed in this paper ensures the detection accuracy and improves the detection speed. It overcomes the problem of slow detection speed of mold part wear using 3D point cloud.