Combining Expert Formula and Geometric Feature Extraction for Die Design

Die design is a critical phase in extrusion industry for aluminium products with complex geometries. An acceptable die design generally required tedious finite-element analysis and necessitates hundreds of computer simulations, requiring several weeks or months of lead time. In this paper, we focused on one particular aspects of extrusion die design, namely the optimisation of the locality of the die orifice and the maximum number of orifice that can be placed in the die head. To achieve this, we combine the medial-axes transformation algorithm, a tool for geometric interrogation, and heuristic empirical design formula to locate the optimum die location and proceed to estimate the maximum possible number of die orifice allowed for a given geometries. The analyses show that our proposed algorithm can be implemented easily and results can be obtained almost immediately.