Abstract
Internal capacity of a refrigerator is an important indicator for design and purchasing criteria. The components facing the internal space may have holes or gaps between parts. In traditional way, design engineers manually remodeled the parts to fill the holes and the gaps for enclosed boundary of the internal space. Then they calculated internal volume by subtracting the assembly of parts from its enclosing volume. However, filling holes and gaps is not an automated process requiring a plenty of labor and time. In this research, we have developed a voxel-based method to estimate the internal volume of a refrigerator automatically. It starts transforming all components facing the interior space into voxels and fills all holes and gaps automatically by the developed hole-filling algorithm to form a completely closed boundary of the assembly. Then, it identifies the boundary voxels that are facing to the internal voxels with any part of the component. After getting the intersection points between the boundary voxels and the surfaces of components, it generates the boundary surface of triangular facets with the intersection points. Finally, it estimates the internal volume by adding volume of each tetrahedron composed of a triangle of boundary surface and an arbitrary point.