Tubemod - a working NC-instruction-driven simulation system for imported NC tube benders

Tubemod was developed with the object-oriented method. Its integrated simulation model was proposed. The model took into full consideration the following information items needed for instruction driving: (1) motion and deformation, (2) collision detection, (3) adjustments to different tubes and to different machines, (4) geometry and assembly of machine tools. Series of tube benders and dies were organized in tube bender database and die database respectively. Since each change of the tube bending process was formalized as the action of NC instructions directly, the motion calculation, the collision detection and the animation display of the system become much simpler, and thus faster.