machining parameters. If you have an issue, it has been nar- rowed down to one of these causes, and you don’t have to backtrack to alter your CAM program. Optimize your process. As you gain experience, you will be able to hone in on feeds, speeds, tooling, and setups most appropriate for the types of blisk machining work you are attracting. Over time, you will reduce costs and improve lead times as your familiarity with the blisk machining pro- cess deepens.
In an ideal world, the blisk manufacturer would always be working from a clean fi le sent to him directly from his customer’s master CAD system.
What Are Your Alternatives? With better understanding of the advantages of expert
software and what it takes to get started, you should step back and determine if it has a place in your manufactur- ing processes. Having a programmer spend a week writing a conventional CAM program for a blisk may be all right if it is not likely that another one is coming up for months. However, if you have fi ve-axis machines waiting for blisk programs, this indicates a need to accelerate your program- ming process.
Often a viable alternative is to hire a contract programmer/ consultant who can help you with the simultaneous fi ve-axis preliminaries and write your programs. If this individual is us- ing expert blade software himself, then you will obtain many of its productivity advantages without having to pay for it. If you do want to purchase expert CAM software for mul- tibladed disks, you should know there are several types you can choose from, including:
• Stand-alone: You can buy add-ons that give you expert ca- pabilities and you are left on your own to implement them.
• Packaged with Service: More expensive add-ons may be packaged with implementation services so the software vendor stays with you through all of the preliminary steps and the first several parts.
• Dedicated CAD/CAM: There are also packages that encompass both the design and manufacture of bladed disks. You will always have a clean CAD file but this alternative can be very pricey and you won’t be able to integrate your blisk programs with some conventional machining operations.
Cutting soft parts is an important process development step, not because it is likely to uncover programming errors, but rather because it will give the user confi dence.
When evaluating a product like this, every shop needs to do a little soul-searching to see where and how it might fi t. A small shop in Eastern Europe recently had their vendor set up a demo of expert blade software and immediately is- sued a purchase order. They considered it to be a giant step toward a manufacturing capability they hoped to perfect. A large turbo machinery manufacturer conducted two demo projects to evaluate the same package. This company al- ready had a huge investment in a very effective process and legacy software for high-volume manufacturing of blisks. The product was not a fi t for their production operations but it is now being carefully considered as a fast-track approach for prototyping.
Whatever your situation, there is one last caveat you must be aware of. As soon as you begin to program bladed disks faster and make them more effi ciently, your customers will be sending you even more complex simultaneous fi ve- axis machining work (and not necessarily blisks). Are you up for it?
63 — Energy Manufacturing 2015
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