REGISTER FOR YOUR FREE COPY OF AEROSPACE MANUFACTURING BY VISITING:
WWW.AERO-MAG.COM 26 AEROSPACEMANUFACTURING | MARCH 2013
METALLICS I MACHINING
The triumphant tripod heads
With the emphasis firmly on long and narrow aerospace components, Dörries Scharmann says its Ecospeed F 1040 is a qualified three-legged success story.
xperts in the aerospace manufacturing community don’t often share the same opinion, with one notable exception: few technologies have influenced aerospace machining more than the Sprint Z3 parallel kinematics head concept. Machine tool builder Dörries Scharmann (DST), now part of the Starrag Group, has equipped the newest member of its Ecospeed-F series with the proven tripod head design. Aerospace manufacturing has many success stories where ambitious customers have partnered with creative machine tool builders to find unique solutions. In 1999 the then DaimlerChrysler Aerospace – now Premium Aerotec – started to look for a new manufacturing technology for high speed cutting (HSC) of structural parts for the Eurofighter Typhoon programme. This new technology had to be capable of performing precise and dynamic 5-axis machining operations on medium to large fuselage frames, and achieve a cost reduction of at least 30%. Premium Aerotec quickly recognised conventional Cartesian machine tools were incapable of meeting these requirements, and subsequently joined forces with DST to develop a new HSC concept based on a horizontal triple parallel rod kinematics tripod head. The four machining centres delivered in 2000 are still producing parts on a three-shift basis. The 70,000+ production hours per machine are proof of the longevity and reliability of this technology.
E
The father of invention One of the fathers of this completely new manufacturing technology was the experienced aerospace engineer, Alfred Lilla, at that time head of NC programming at Premium Aerotec’s plant in Augsburg. The combination of parallel kinematics and HSC far exceeded the ambitious targets compared to the existing conventional machining methods and costs were reduced by between 30-50%. “This equipment allowed us to profitably machine even one- off parts,” begins Lilla.
Yulkok says the Ecospeed machines enable them to produce long, narrow structural parts with complex 5-axis geometries at high metal removal rates, more precisely and economically than before
This parallel kinematics development has since
revolutionised the aerospace world in the field of aluminium machining. The Typhoon programme work was followed by successes with passenger aircraft programmes using machine tools from the Ecospeed range. In 2003 the first system for parts with a length of 7m for the Airbus A380 aerostructures was introduced. “Customers around the world employ this technology and are
milling complex integral structural parts from solid which, a few years ago, would have been cumbersomely assembled from scores of sheet metal parts and thousands of fasteners,” claims DST’s CEO, Dr Norbert Hennes. “A 4 ton aluminium billet can be transformed into a 120kg complex structural part in three
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48