Feature recognition in axisymmetrical parts modeled by solids in an Internet-oriented CAD/CAM system

In the last years more and more people have been having access to the Internet, which has reduced or even eliminated the distances among people and/or groups located physically distant among them. The Internet has also enabled the development of applications for the support to the design and manufacturing activities of industrial parts. In this work, a system will be presented for the recognition of features in cylindrical parts created with the ACIS solid modeling kernel through the Internet. In the part design stage, the user inputs in the browser the elements that compose the part. These data are analyzed, and if there is no inconsistency, they are sent via Common Gateway Interface (CGI) to the software that is in the server. To visualize the part, the file with the solid in the Standard ACIS Text (SAT) format is transformed into the Virtual Reality Markup Language (VRML) format, and soon afterwards it is sent to browser of the remote user. The part may contain cylinders, cones and chamfers. The user can slice the part along the rotation axis, and he can also obtain the file in the SAT format from the server, in case he wants to handle the part in his own CAD software. After finishing the design of the part, the software recognizes the features in the part, which it is accomplished through the automatic analysis of half of the profile of the part in 2D. These features can be used in the process of generating the NC program for the CNC machine.