Reverse Engineering Based Methodology for Redesigning Contour Milling Tools

Abstract

Reverse Engineering (RE) involves the use of techniques aimed to retrieve information about manufactured products, not only regarding geometries, but also materials and functionality. Today, even if several RE techniques are known, many of them still leave the object unusable to analyze. Nevertheless, other alternatives to this problem allows for obtaining a Digital or Virtual Model (VM) via the three-dimensional scanning. Getting the VM of an item, via scanning or not, can offer many possibilities to digital analysis (FEM). Furthermore, starting from VM, it is possible to achieve the physical reproduction of an element, part or workpiece-in the same or different materials-using Additive Manufacturing (AM) technologies. This enables to improve the product through a redesign process. In this paper, a RE based methodology is proposed for redesigning a tool for contour milling, after comparing different microscopy based techniques, 3D-Scanner tools and CAD-CAGD utilities for generating a Virtual Model of the newly designed mill.