| RE (REVERSE ENGINEERING) |
|
What is Reverse Engineering? Reverse Engineering is the process of designing, manufacturing, assembling, and maintaining products and systems. There are two types of engineering, forward engineering and reverse engineering. Forward engineering is the traditional process of moving from high-level abstractions and logical designs to the physical implementation of a system. In some situations, there may be a physical part/product without any technical details, such as drawings, bills-of-material, or without engineering data. The process of duplicating an existing part, subassembly, or product, without drawings, documentation, or a computer model is known as Reverse Engineering (RE). Reverse Engineering is also defined as the process of obtaining a geometric CAD model from 3-D points acquired by scanning/ digitizing existing parts/products.  Why use Reverse Engineering? Following are some of the reasons for using reverse engineering: * The original manufacturer no longer exists, but a customer needs the product, e.g., aircraft spares required typically after an aircraft has been in service for several years. * The original manufacturer of a product no longer produces the product, e.g., the original product has become obsolete. * The original product design documentation has been lost or never existed. * Creating data to refurbish or manufacture a part for which there are no CAD data, or for which the data have become obsolete or lost. * Inspection and/or Quality Control–Comparing a fabricated part to its CAD description or to a standard item. * Some bad features of a product need to be eliminated e.g., excessive wear might indicate where a product should be improved. * Analyzing the good and bad features of competitors’ products. * Exploring new avenues to improve product performance and features. * Creating 3-D data from a model or sculpture for animation in games and movies. * Creating 3-D data from an individual, model or sculpture to create, scale, or reproduce artwork. Reverse engineering of mechanical devices As Computer Aided Design (CAD) has become more popular, reverse engineering has become a viable method to create a 3D virtual model of an existing physical part for use in 3D CAD, CAM, CAE and other software. The reverse-engineering process involves measuring an object and then reconstructing it as a 3D model. The physical object can be measured using 3D scanning technologies like CMMs, laser scanners, structured light digitizers or computed tomography. The measured data alone, usually represented as a point cloud, lacks topological information and is therefore often processed and modeled into a more usable format such as a triangular-faced mesh, a set of NURBS surfaces or a CAD model. Reverse engineering is also used by businesses to bring existing physical geometry into digital product development environments, to make a digital 3D record of their own products or to assess competitors' products. It is used to analyze, for instance, how a product works, what it does, and what components it consists of, estimate costs, and identify potential patent infringement, etc. Reverse engineering of rapid prototype Reserve Engineering of rapid prototype is mostly applied to amend design for the ready-made product, vehicle design and product inspection. It can dramatically quicken and improve the design through the betterment of designing flow. By using reverse engineering, a three-dimensional physical product or clay mock-up can be quickly captured in the digital form, remodeled, and exported for rapid prototyping/tooling or rapid manufacturing using multi-axis CNC machining techniques. The process depicted in figure below: 1.analyze the original model. 2.scan the model with 3D measuring machine to do the digital amending in professional software. 3.turn the original date into precise ones through software. 4.after simulated assembly and analysis, or regulate, these precise model can be used for rapid prototype or mold. 5.Do CNC machining with metal or plastic material in 2-24 hours. After surface finishing, the finished prototype can be used for evaluating design or sample show. Legality In the United States and many other countries, even if an artifact or process is protected by trade secrets, reverse-engineering the artifact or process is often lawful as long as it is obtained legitimately. Patents, on the other hand, need a public disclosure of an invention, and therefore, patented items do not necessarily have to be reverse-engineered to be studied. One common motivation of reverse engineers is to determine whether a competitor's product contains patent infringements or copyright infringements. Reverse engineering software or hardware systems which is done for the purposes of interoperability (for example, to support undocumented file formats or undocumented hardware peripherals) is mostly believed to be legal, though patent owners often contest this and attempt to stifle any reverse engineering of their products for any reason. |
