Nesting of complex sheet metal parts

Abstract

In the mass production of sheet metal parts, saving of materials is very important as material cost is the major portion of the overall production cost. By making use of the Minkowski sum evaluation, efficient nesting of part blanks is achieved. In the part layout formation, strip pitch and width are calculated for different blank-pair orientations. The optimum orientation of two nested pairs that results in the greatest material utilization is then obtained. These algorithms for nesting and part layout formation are implemented in SolidWorks and some case studies carried out on typical parts to demonstrate the method are discussed. It was found that for parts that have the Minkowski sum inner loop, a very high material utilization can be achieved.