Hello my friends. We have received comments related to our previous technical letter that talks about the advantages of our Reverse Engineering service and some questions about what the procedure is like. Therefore, we are going to explain, in a general and visual way, what the process looks like on the computer during the stages of this service.

As a common case for Rice Foundries, we will use a piece known to many as a bell, which is used for liquid pump feeding systems. There are many designs of this type of component, so it is usually necessary to verify each one when a repair is requested, or as the case shown here, a replacement of a fairly worn part whose original design is not known.

The image shown is a point cloud taken with our laser equipment. It is not a configurable part yet, that is, we cannot manipulate it and create geometries on it. However, thanks to the captured points we can appreciate the real damages that the original piece has, such as holes that were added arbitrarily over time, holes worn by long clamping times subjected to great stresses and wear in the central hole or in the eaves. Definitely the piece is incomplete as a result of the accumulated damage in its years of service.

Even so, we can say that there are two advantages that allow us to successfully carry out the Reverse Engineering process, what are these?

Amazing, right? At Rice Foundries we like to know how far we can help the client, so meshing is not the final step, although it can help us to elaborate the model, we consider it necessary to elaborate a representation of the solid piece that has physical properties that we can calculate in a simulation and until now, the computer interprets it as something hollow, without mass or physical properties such as the type or hardness of the material, essential data to simulate the performance of the part once it has been manufactured, installed and subjected to the same efforts that caused its wear previously. So we use certain design tools that assign these properties and then we simulate the drilling and profiling operations, as if it were a CNC machine, and we finish the solid of the piece, with a result like the following.

And now, once a solid piece is obtained, we can simulate its performance in the field and modify what is necessary for the client to use it with the quality that distinguishes Rice Foundries (you can learn about this type of simulations in our previous technical letters), and in this case, we can consider a satisfied client who also asked for our Reverse Engineering service for his impeller in similar conditions, but that is a story for another time.

For now, this is a photograph of the final piece that the client received after the entire process.