Reverse engineering, also called back engineering, is the process by which a man-made object is deconstructed to reveal its designs, architecture, or to extract knowledge from the object.
There are many reasons for performing reverse engineering in various fields. Reverse engineering has its origins in the analysis of hardware for commercial or military advantage and various fields like medical, core companies manufacturing gears, parts for vehicles and any other components sizing from microns to the size more than of a wind mill blade.
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 or 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 Industrial CT Scanning (computed tomography). The measured data alone, usually represented as a point cloud, lacks topological information and design intent. The former may be recovered by converting the point cloud to a triangular-faced mesh. Reverse engineering aims to go beyond producing such a mesh, and to recover the design intent in terms of simple analytical surfaces where appropriate (planes, cylinders, etc), as well as possibly NURBS surfaces, to produce a boundary-representation CAD model. Recovery of such a model allows a design to be modified to meet new requirements, a manufacturing plan to be generated, etc.
The need for reverse engineering emerges only when a ancient old model working over decade has to be improved for the better efficiency but the company or association when the design of the existing model is destroyed or not present with them and the engineer has to reproduce it from the model present to them physically that’s where reverse engineering comes to play. A series of process has to be performed in order to reverse engineer.
The engineer has to dimensionally analyse the component present to him using various instruments ranging from manual instruments to machines which automatically produces the required by giving commands.If the component is geomentrically complicated they use scanning machines which prints the image on to a software and then the design is carried out.
