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Tag Archives: Siemens Sinumerik 840D

New Generation of Operator Panels For High-End CNC Applications

The Sinumerik blackline panels from the Siemens are a new generation of operator panels  for the Sinumerik 840D sl CNC system and offer new options for machine tool operation.

The Sinumerik blackline panels from the Siemens are a new generation of operator panels
for the Sinumerik 840D sl CNC system and offer new options for machine tool operation.

  • Robust and durable capacitive touchscreen operator panels
  • 40% energy savings compared to conventional neon lamps
  • Liquid and dust resistant, ideal for harsh conditions

The Sinumerik blackline panels OP 015 black and OP 019 black are a new generation of operator panels for the Sinumerik 840D sl CNC system and offer new options for machine operation. The inductive sensor technology enables rapid interaction with the user interface even when the operator is wearing gloves. Similarly, it prevents incorrect entries, for example caused by the heel of the operator‘s hand.

The 19-inch display of the OP 019 black can show all the entries made in widescreen format at a glance. The OP 015 black also features an alphanumerical keypad on the right that can be operated via touch control. This feature means that the 15-inch display is not restricted by the superimposed keypad during data entry, which ensures clear and efficient operation. Both blackline panels also have an integrated glass panel on the front side and are designed with IP65 (OP 019 black) and IP66 (OP 015 black) degrees of protection. They are resistant to liquids and dust and can be operated even under harsh industrial conditions. An integrated key lock helps safeguard against operating errors. The operator panel can provide a basic machine display, with three or four channels showing up to 13 axes.

The blackline panels also feature durable LED background lighting, providing 40 percent energy-savings compared to conventional neon lamps.

In combination with the Sinumerik 840D sl control, for use on high-end milling, turning, grinding and laser cutting machine tools, the blackline panels can be used as an operating and programming station for aerospace composite machining, power generation and medical part manufacturing, in addition to tool- and mold-making, rotary indexing machines and in shopfloor manufacturing.

For specific product information and inquiries, call (800) 879-8079
ext. Marketing Communications or send an e-mail to: SiemensMTBUMarCom.industry@siemens.com

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The Siemens Industry Sector is the world’s leading supplier of innovative and environmentally friendly automation and drive technology, industrial software and technology-based services. The Sector’s comprehensive portfolio covers the entire industrial value chain, from product design, engineering and production to services. Siemens enhances its customers’ productivity, efficiency, and flexibility in a wide variety of different industries. With a global workforce of more than 100,000 employees, the Industry Sector comprises the Divisions Industry Automation, Drive Technologies and Customer Services as well as the Business Unit Metals Technologies.

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Fabtech 2013: Flying Optic Laser Helps Iowa Job Shop Soar

Service, support and training seal the deal for Janco Industries and Han Kwang. View the case study here.

For additional product information and inquiries, call (800) 879-8079 ext. Marketing Communications or send an e-mail to: SiemensMTBUMarCom.industry@siemens.com.

Follow us on Facebook: www.facebook.com/SiemensCNC or Twitter:  www.twitter.com/siemens_cnc_us.

Siemens Industry Sector is the world’s leading supplier of innovative and environmentally friendly products, solutions and services for industrial customers. With end-to-end automation technology and industrial software, solid vertical-market expertise, and technology-based services, the sector enhances its customers’ productivity, efficiency and flexibility. With a global workforce of more than 100,000 employees, the Industry Sector comprises the Industry Automation, Drive Technologies and Customer Services Divisions as well as the Metals Technologies Business Unit. For more information, visit http://www.usa.siemens.com/industry.

The Siemens Drive Technologies Division is the world’s leading supplier of products, systems, applications, solutions and services for the entire drive train, with electrical and mechanical components. Drive Technologies serves all vertical markets in the production and process industries as well as the infrastructure/energy segment. With its products and solutions, the division enables its customers to achieve productivity, energy efficiency and reliability. For more information, visit http://www.usa.siemens.com/drivetechnologies.

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Coast Composites Achieves Higher Accuracies On Invar Tooling For Aerospace Structures

Coast Composites Inc, part of the UK-based Hampson Industries Plc, is a major supplier of Invar tooling, as well as resin transfer molds and mandrels used in the composite lay-up and manufacture of today’s advanced flight critical aerospace structures.  On the large, long bed CNC gantry mills used at its main facility in Irvine, California, the company is achieving an unprecedented accuracy on even the longest wing skins, as a result of two complementary technologies that have been combined here.

On the largest CNC mill at Coast, a German-built Handtmann five-axis machine that uses twin Siemens Sinumerik 840D numerical controls, the Siemens Volumetric Compensation System (VCS) acts in tandem with a proprietary temperature compensation system devised and implemented by Coast engineers.  By combining these technologies with ongoing laser calibration, Coast achieves and maintains accuracies to +/- 0.003” on its longest runs.  The Handtmann gantry mill can accommodate structures to 22’ wide x 75’ long x 84” high.

In operation, Siemens VCS factors all the machine kinematics of its various axes of motion, as well as pitch, yaw and roll, to precisely adjust the orientation of the tool tip to the workpiece.  Simultaneously, the Coast temperature compensation system, developed over the company’s years in Invar tooling production for composite parts, further adjusts the machine’s accuracy to compensate the expansion of the machine and the workpiece for ambient temperature variations over a 24-hour period.  While other companies in the industry typically run such machine tools in a completely air-conditioned environment, Coast Composites has devised its temperature compensation system to overcome these variables in ambient factory conditions and still maintain an accuracy that often exceeds the customer specification, regardless of the material being machined.

Invar tooling is the industry standard for composite lay-up, owing to its low coefficient of thermal expansion, but, as Coast President Paul Walsh explains, “While the material is a high nickel-iron alloy, which gives it great stability, the bottom line is you still get thermal growth over the long distance runs we process.  The system we developed was the result of a lengthy analysis on all our long bed machine tools here.”  Coast Composites runs the Handtmann mill at its Irvine facility, as well as Henri Liné five- and six-axis mills, plus SNK and Amura gantry and bridge mills.  A 15-year-old Nicolas Correa five-axis gantry mill was recently retrofitted with a new Siemens CNC, motor and drives package, improving both its accuracy and speed, according to Walsh.

Coast Composites founder and current Director of Best Practices, Jerry Anthony, adds, “We knew the Siemens Volumetric Compensation System had substantial merit for our operation when it was first introduced to us, precisely because of the workpiece sizes we run and the corresponding thermal growth during machining, even on Invar tools.  We had developed our temperature compensation system to adjust the go-to points from the control for real-time temperature on the machine and the workpiece.    The data covered all aspects of our machining, from material composition to acceleration/deceleration mapping and the temperature variations over the largest pieces and longest machine cycles we had performed.”  He notes that Coast Composites runs many grades of aluminum, plus A36, P20, stainless, monolithic graphite, carbon fiber composites and other materials, in addition to Invar 36 and 42.  The evolution of tooling materials processed by Coast corresponds, Anthony points out, to the changes in the aerospace industry, as the majority of formerly metal parts and structures are now produced by hand lay-up carbon fiber, machine applied carbon reinforced fiber tape, resin infusion processing, filament winding and other manufacturing technologies.

Expanding on the Coast Composites temperature compensation system, Anthony details the on-machine inspection of the workpiece and how the Siemens CNC is actually used to complete this process.  “We have used laser tracking in tandem with our Valisys inspection software for some time now, having had a Siemens CNC engineer in Elk Grove Village, Illinois write the machine tool inspection interface software for us.  In this way, we were and are now still able to use the power of the CNC to run real-time inspections and data analysis that have been extremely useful as an in-process inspection system for any tool manufactured by Coast.”  He muses that the Coast system, “…essentially turns every machine tool here into its own CMM (coordinate measuring machine).”  By developing this system at Coast Composites, Jerry Anthony concludes, the laser tracker is now used primarily for final checking, as the in-process monitoring produces what he suggests “…might be the highest accuracy machining standard in the aerospace industry.”

Walsh further comments on the evolution of composites in the commercial sector of the aerospace industry and at Coast.  “Composites were only being used in non-critical applications but have nowemerged on the fuselage, wings, vertical tail and control surfaces, to a much greater degree.  As one of the earliest players in the commercial composites arena, we have been responding to market conditions quite successfully and continue this trend today.”  Coast Composites supplies tooling for the B777, B787, F-22, F-35, A380, A350 XWB, A320 and other aircraft.  On a recent A350 XWB job, the final Coast center wing box section tooling was loaded on an Antonov An-225, the world’s largest aircraft built to date, for transport from Long Beach, California to France.  This tool is the first tooling delivery for the A350 XWB program.

On the massive Handtmann five-axis gantry mill, application engineering and training assistance were provided to Coast Composites by the machine tool builder’s local representative, Bryan Wilson of BD Technology, as well as personnel from the Siemens Aerospace Center of Competence.

Coast Composites is ISO 9001-2000 registered and AS-9100 Certified and holds numerous customer quality accreditations, including Boeing, Airbus, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed, Kawasaki, GKN and Mitsubishi, among others.

Coast Composites also builds tooling for the construction of such end products as satellite reflectors, used in the telecom and military markets.

HOW THIS MARRIAGE WORKS

In his role as company founder and current Director of Best Practices at Coast Composites, Jerry Anthony has taken great interest in the development of the company’s temperature compensation system, especially when it was recently “married” to the Siemens Volumetric Compensation System (VCS).  The key point of interface for such a system is within the algorithms of the CNC, acting to compensate the signal before sending commands to the motors and drives for adaptive action on the machine tool.

In a typical long machining cycle on the very large parts produced at Coast, temperature variations in the workpiece material combine with the naturally occurring thermal expansion in the machine tool to create serious dimensional issues.  This is true for whatever material is being run on the machine, even the Invar high nickel-iron alloy used extensively at Coast for producing composite lay-up tooling, fiber tape mandrels and other structures.  While Invar has an extremely low coefficient of thermal expansion, the length of the machine cycle invariably (the word from which Invar got its name) results in sufficient thermal movement of the machine, which adversely affects the tool tip position.

In the Siemens VCS, the CNC compensates for 21 error factors of machine axes, pitch, yaw and roll.  The true workpiece coordinates, rather than the programmed tool tip position, determine the actual cutting path.  In conjunction with the highly advanced Siemens cutter path contouring, this compensation process results in a smoother finish on the part surface and a very high degree of machining accuracy.

In the Coast application, they have further enhanced this process by combining its proprietary temperature compensation system with the VCS inside the CNC to produce a highly accurate cutting path that takes into account the thermal expansion rates for the particular material being run as well as the machine itself.

The standard NC program assumes a 20ºC (68ºF) normal operating condition.  This would be the norm for a CMM.  The CNC incorporates the Coast temperature compensation system software, while the DNC runs the Valisys software, reading off the Renishaw touch probe data from the workpiece surface.  Thus, the temperature compensation is within the machine control, resulting in real-time adjustments to the machine movement and an overall improved surface finish with superior accuracy, according to Anthony.  “We have run enough material types and enough cycles to develop animpressive data base of averages over time.  Our algorithms are the key and, when married to the Siemens power onboard the CNC, result in the old adage that says the whole really is greater than the sum of the parts.”

Siemens Aerospace Center of Competence engineers worked closely with the on-staff engineers at Coast Composites to consummate this marriage and, according to Anthony, the results have been beneficial for both parties.

“The relationship between the Siemens Aerospace Center of Competence and Coast Composites began seven years ago and has progressed to a true partnership, as the two companies have worked together consistently, merging advanced theoretical technologies with experiential knowledge.  This has been and continues to be a very dynamic synergy between our companies.  Siemens is proud to work with such a leader in the aerospace segment,” according to the Siemens account manager for Coast Composites.

For more information, please contact: 

Coast Composites Inc. Tooling Division
Web:  www.coastcomposites.com
Email:  info@coastcomposites.com Attention:  Jerry Anthony or Paul Walsh.

Siemens Industry, Inc. Drive Technologies — Motion Control (Machine Tool) 
Aerospace Center of Competence Web:  www.usa.siemens.com/cnc

Siemens Machine Tool Business
John Meyer
Manager, Marketing Communications
Siemens Industry, Inc.
(847) 640-1595
www.usa.siemens.com/cnc
SiemensMTBUMarCom.industry@siemens.com

Follow us on Facebook: www.facebook.com/SiemensCNC or Twitter:  www.twitter.com/siemens_cnc_us.

Siemens Industry Sector is the world’s leading supplier of innovative and environmentally friendly products, solutions and services for industrial customers. With end-to-end automation technology and industrial software, solid vertical-market expertise, and technology-based services, the sector enhances its customers’ productivity, efficiency and flexibility. With a global workforce of more than 100,000 employees, the Industry Sector comprises the Industry Automation, Drive Technologies and Customer Services Divisions as well as the Metals Technologies Business Unit. For more information, visit http://www.usa.siemens.com/industry.

The Siemens Drive Technologies Division is the world’s leading supplier of products, systems, applications, solutions and services for the entire drive train, with electrical and mechanical components. Drive Technologies serves all vertical markets in the production and process industries as well as the infrastructure/energy segment. With its products and solutions, the division enables its customers to achieve productivity, energy efficiency and reliability. For more information, visit http://www.usa.siemens.com/drivetechnologies.

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