Computation of components’ interfaces in highly complex assemblies

•Computation of interfaces between components in complex CAD assemblies.•GPU ray-casting technique for efficient processing of large assemblies.•Accurate NURBS geometry of the interfaces, stored in standard STEP file.

The preparation of CAD models from complex assemblies for simulation purposes is a very time-consuming and tedious process, since many tasks such as meshing and idealization are still completed manually. Herein, the detection and extraction of geometric interfaces between components of the assembly is of central importance not only for the simulation objectives but also for all necessary shape transformations such as idealizations or detail removals. It is a repetitive task in particular when complex assemblies have to be dealt with. This paper proposes a method to rapidly and fully automatically generate a precise geometric description of interfaces in generic B-Rep CAD models. The approach combines an efficient GPU ray-casting technique commonly used in computer graphics with a graph-based curve extraction algorithm. Not only is it able to detect a large number of interfaces efficiently, it also provides an accurate Nurbs geometry of the interfaces, that can be stored in a plain STEP file (Iso 10303-1:1994 (1994))  [16] for further downstream treatment. We demonstrate our approach on examples from aeronautics and automotive industry.