like automotive assembly. The comment that I often hear: ‘I don’t need parts faster, I need them at a consistent production rate’ sounds just like the automotive industry. At Boeing, for example, that translates into 98.7% uptime for machine avail- ability that is expected.”
Complex Airfoil Designs Challenge Machining
“All the engine manufacturers have run their hot gas path temperature to well above 2000° F [1093° C],” said Larry Marchand, vice president, United Grinding Technologies (Miamisburg, OH). “Ceramics are used for coatings and base material and are diffi cult to machine, as are alloys with exotic elements like chrome, tungsten and nickel that are used for the increasingly complex investment castings for blade vanes and shrouds. In addition, cast- ings feature complex three-dimensional airfoil design making them that much harder to machine.
“There has been a shift in what our aerospace customers expect from us,” said Marchand. “The mix of turnkeys required has shifted from 25% 10 years ago to 75% today. Our custom- ers want us to design it, build it, debug it, troubleshoot, and run off systems, activities that would have been done internally in the past.” “There’s a defi nite trend toward
fl exibility in engine machining, requiring quick response to engineering changes. We use the term multitasking to describe this fl exibility when we talk about our toolchanging grinding centers like the Magerle MFP 50 grinding center. It’s a fi ve-axis toolchanging machine which can do milling, turning, and drilling, as well as grinding. If you have a part with a lot of milling, obviously it’s going to be cheaper to mill it, because they’re mass produced. But if you have a part that is
Inconel 718
Stainless Steel 316 Titanium 6Al-4V
80% grinding that has a couple of holes that have to be drilled, which is very common with turbine vanes, or slots and keyways, the multitasking grinding center is a good way to eliminate the need for secondary milling and fi xturing,” said Marchand.
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