Edward Sinkora is senior product manager, United Grinding Technologies Inc. (Miamisburg, OH), a developer of tool-grinding systems and related software.
Toolgrinding Software Simulations Help Speed Medical Device Manufacturing
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Manufacturing Engineering: What are some recent techni- cal advances in tool-grinding software? Ed Sinkora: Probably the most important advancement has been the ability to create increasingly complex cutting tools, to the point where individual parameters can vary from cutting edge to cutting edge, and within a given cutting edge. For example, the latest software allows the user to vary the helix individually per tooth and even along the same cutting edge, or vary the rake from tooth to tooth, and so forth. One market
ments and show you the result immediately. The same applies to any other geometric attribute you want to adjust. ME: What industries can best take advantage of advanced grinding today? Sinkora: Anyone who needs to machine hard materials, like Inconel or cobalt-chromium, should consider grinding. And if he needs to make complex forms, this often requires advanced five-axis grinding, especially if the accuracy require- ments or other factors demand doing the job in one setup.
“Three-dimensional simulation is critical to speeding the design of new products, as the engineer can immediately see what is and isn’t possible given the reality of grinding wheels and machine moves.”
survey showed that by 2009, 80-90% of the new tools being developed had such variable parameterization. Why so many? One reason is that the major vendors are making it relatively easy to program complex tools. One ap- proach is to provide simple wizards that walk you through set- up and pull feeds and speeds from a database. Our software, Helitronic Tool Studio, goes beyond this to provide an elegant and interactive interface that immediately shows each change you make in 3-D. For example, let’s say you’ve created a tool with different helix angles on each tooth. A very simple slider allows you to specify the point on the tool where the indexing should be uniform, normally at the halfway point of the grind- ing length. The software will make all the necessary adjust-
Key examples of this are certain orthopedic implants, like femoral knees, and some of the turbine components that go into the ‘hot’ portion of the engine. ME: What key grinding and software tools can help medical device builders? Sinkora: Orthopedic implants are typically designed and
modeled in a CAD package and Siemens PLM’s NX appears to be the most popular choice. So the most useful grinding package would use the NX CAM package to create the ma- chining program and also provide an easy operator interface for the machine. That’s exactly what we’ve done with our NXis Ortho solution. The key factor for us was switching to the FANUC control some years back, since it runs industry-