MEDICAL MACHINING Further clarifying the condition of the in-process stock
relative to the finished part profile is Mastercam’s Compare feature, Goodrich said. “This feature compares the machined material to the finished part model with user- specified tolerances and clearly displays any ma- terial remaining as well as any over-cut, gouged features.” The result is a better use of machine time as well as of stock.
Tight Simulations
Multiaxis machining equipment and the tools and automation needed to meet cus- tomer demand are a big investment for medical manufacturers and the thought of the cost of downtime and repairs if a program goes wrong can bring night sweats to the most hardened of executives. For this reason, a growing number of companies are first trying out their machining programs on virtual machines by way of simula- tion software. “The trend in medical device manufacturing is going to-
of this project. In the end, however, the customer was able to avoid a lot of risk and save time by working with the simula- tion to optimize their new machining cells.
Star CNC ST-38 model features the company’s multiturret technology and has the capacity to machine components ranging in size to 38 mm.
While that customer’s machines used FANUC controls,
ward more and more use of complex multitasking machines,” said Silvère Proisy, general manager of Spring Technologies Inc. (Boston, MA, and Paris), a developer of NC simulation and verification software for optimizing CNC machines. “Ma- chines that are complex enough to do everything, and this is where simulation can have a crucial impact on a company’s return on investment.” Proisy offered the example of a major medical-device OEM that recently invested in some five-axis machining centers that feature dynamic offsets to allow the completion of a complex part in a single operation as well as in robotic loading/unloading equipment. The company “needed to make sure that when they set up a new program, its going to execute correctly without any crashes or any part issue,” Proisy said. “We have to take into account all of the parameters that reside in the real machine. When we set up the simulation, we ask the customer to give us all of the knowledge about the subroutine macros from the machine—we extract these from the real machine and put it into the simulation.” The more abilities a machine and its CNC software have,
the more parameters need to be reflected in the simulation’s virtual machine, according to Proisy.
“It can be very complicated,” he said. “It took us a couple of months to set the virtual machine up properly” in the case
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AdvancedManufacturing.org | March 2016
Proisy pointed out that this simulation system can work with machining programs from any software package. “Another medical client asked us in 2012 if we could sim- ulate and optimize an operation that used a legacy program that was written with software that doesn’t exist anymore or programmed manually,” he said. “We said yes because ulti- mately we are reading G code. As long as a program comes down to G code moves, we can simulate it no matter what the software was.
“People at that company told us later on that just by putting that operation into our software, they were able to significantly cut machining time,” he said. “After a year they had saved half a million dollars just through time saved.”
?
CNC Software Inc. 800-228-2877 /
www.mastercam.com
Iscar Metals
817-258-3200 /
www.iscarmetals.com Mazak Corp.
859-342-1700 /
www.mazakusa.com
Mitsui Seiki USA Inc. 201-337-1300 /
www.mitsuiseiki.com
Star CNC Machine Tool Corp. 516-484-0500 /
http://www.starcnc.com/
Spring Technologies Inc. 617-401-2197 /
www.ncsimul.com
Photo courtesy Star CNC
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