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CAD
Home » Manufacturing » Injection Molding » CADCAD stands for Computer Aided Design. CAD is the use of a range of computer based tools that help architects, engineers, and designers in design activities. Computer Aided Design is how almost all injection molds are created.
CAD is sometimes translated as computer assisted, or computer aided drafting. All these terms are synonymous for CAD. CAD is used to develop and design products which can be used by consumers or in other products. CAD is also used in the design of machines and tools. Modern capabilities of CAD systems include modeling, design, data exchange, packaging and more.
Today, most CAD computer workstations are Windows based. CAD is essentially an automated system for the design, drafting and display of graphically oriented information. CAD is often used in architecture for the design and development of plans for buildings. Computer Aided Design, CAD is used in engineering to create drawings for modeling and in the electronic field for design automation. It is also used in the manufacturing process for layouts.
Originally software for CAD systems were developed with computer language such as Fortran, but with the advancement of object-oriented programming methods this has radically changed. The development of a typical modern parametric feature based modeler and freeform surface systems are built around a number of key, C programming language, modules with their own APIs. A CAD system can be seen as built up from the interaction a graphical user NURBS geometry via a geometric modeling kernel.
Today most CAD computer workstations are Windows based PCs; some CAD systems also run on hardware running with one of the Unix operating systems and a few with Linux. Generally no special hardware is required with the exception of a high end OpenGL based Graphics card; however for complex product design, machines with high speed (and possibly multiple) CPUs and large amounts of RAM are recommended. The human-machine interface is generally via a computer mouse but can also be via a pen and digitizing graphics tablet. Manipulation of the view of the model on the screen is also sometimes done with the use of a spacemouse/spaceball. Some systems also support stereoscopic glasses for viewing the 3D model.
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