Ball Stud is widely used in mechanical products as a part of ball joint. However, process sequence design of manufacturing ball stud is highly dependent on the experience and trial-and-error of production engineer, requiring time and cost.
In this study, an expert system for ball stud process design is developed in Visual $C^{++}$ language on Pentium PC. The proposed standard process sequence was used to determine intermediate process steps from the given or determined initial billet size. The basic empirical rules for rounding, upsetting, forward extrusion and tapering were applied in obtaining the desired sequence design.
The overall system is composed of a supporting system for input and process display, knowledge-based system for process sequence design and an output module interfaced with CAD system and database system. The initial billet size can be determined by either the developed system or user. Standard designed process can be modified according to the machine capacities. Database system developed with the use of M/S Access manages various knowledge about machine, material and products. It can be also inspected in the developed expert system to effectively utilize the stored information for generating the sequence design for the similar cases. Automatically designed process data is stored as a text file or a '.dxf' file type. Thus, user is able to obtain a drawing of the designed process sequence by implementing the '.dxf' file in AutoCAD.
