Patent ID: 9429932
Filing Date: 2016-08-30
CPC Classification: G05B

Claim Text:
1. A method for characterizing a sheet metal part, the method comprising the steps of: a sensing operation providing physical dimensions of an actual sheet metal part before, during and/or after a forming operation; a feature extractor computing, from these physical dimensions, a measured material flow metric, the measured material flow metric being representative of a geometry of the actual sheet metal part after the forming operation; retrieving, from a computer readable data storage device, reference data that represents the results of a set of simulations of the forming operation, each simulation being associated with a forming operation data set that characterizes the simulation, and a simulated material flow metric that is a result of the simulation; a matching unit determining, from the reference data and the measured material flow metric, a matching forming operation data set whose associated simulated material flow metric most closely matches the measured material flow metric and outputting, on a display device or on the actual sheet metal part, a visual representation of data of the matching forming operation data set or putting a human or machine readable marking on the actual sheet metal part representative of the forming operation data set.