Developments

By Professor Sami Kara Director of Postgraduate Research Faculty of Engineering University of New South Wales Manufacturers in New Zealand and Australia are hearing a constant refrain: to remain competitive in the global manufacturing marketplace, companies must become more productive with fewer resources and must find ways to differentiate themselves from the competition. As well as becoming more ‘lean’ there is increasing pressure to become more environmentally sound. The answer, according to our research at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), School of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering, could be Life Cycle Engineering (LCE). LCE is an approach to product design and manufacture that takes into account the entire product life cycle from beginning to end. With increased resource scarcity there is an opportunity for manufacturers to minimise their environmental impact and improve return, by controlling the entire product life cycle. This is a dramatic departure from the traditional manufacturing approach, which generally concerns itself with the product’s life cycle only up until the end of its warranty period, which has resulted in a disposable society, where many products are simply sent to landfill. The world has limited resources to sustain production. Approximately 89 million barrels of oil and liquid fuels were consumed per day worldwide in 2011 . By 2030 China alone is expected to consume 17.5 million barrels per day . Limited copper resources will cause similar issues. With this increased pressure on resources, manufacturers will eventually have to find alternatives to using high levels of raw materials. If products were designed from the beginning to be dismantled at the end of their lifespan, it would make the recycling process much easier and more cost-effective, and significant resources would not be wasted. LCE would go some way to addressing this issue but to be truly viable it must […]

   Offering both tools and services, Maplesoft Engineering Solutions help engineers validate and optimise product designs, produce extremely fast simulation code for hardware-in-the-loop and other types of simulations where execution speed is critical, and develop specialised analysis and design calculation tools. Maplesoft Engineering Solutions also support model development for model predictive control, an advanced technique used to represent the behaviour of complex systems.  The Maplesoft Engineering Solutions team has expertise in a variety of engineering fields and extensive experience in model-based design. By leveraging the unique benefits of MapleSim and Maple, advanced engineering design tools from Maplesoft, they help engineers reduce development risk, create better products, and get to market faster. MapleSim and Maple are also available for engineers to use directly in their own development projects.  MapleSim is an advanced system-level modelling and simulation tool  that applies modern techniques to dramatically reduce model development time, provide greater insight into system behaviour, and produce fast, high-fidelity simulations. MapleSim is based on Maple, the technical computing software for engineers, mathematicians, and scientists. Maplesoft Engineering Solutions are used by customers in a variety of domains, such as electric and hybrid-electric vehicles, ground transportation, space systems, batteries, mining, and manufacturing. Past projects include a robotic arm for drilling in mines, a motion platform for driving simulators, a torsional vibration analysis tool for marine drivelines, batteries for hybrid-electric vehicles, and dialysis machines. While projects vary greatly, they frequently involve the following: High performance plant models for hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) applications. Generating high-fidelity plant models from many system design tools typically results in code that is not fast enough for real-time, HIL execution, and engineers often perform a trade-off between model fidelity and performance.    

Delcam has launched the 2015 version of its PowerMILL CAM system for high-speed and five-axis machining.  The new release includes improvements to the Vortex high-efficiency area-clearance strategy, improved collision checking to also cover near misses, and more efficient raster finishing.  The Vortex area-clearance strategy produces safe toolpaths with a much deeper cut by using a controlled engagement angle that maintains the optimum cutting conditions for the whole toolpath.  As a result, higher feed rates and material-removal rates are possible, making the cutting time shorter by as much as 70%. In addition, cutting is undertaken at a more consistent volume-removal rate and at a near constant feedrate, so extending tool life and protecting the machine. Two enhancements in PowerMILL 2015 will give even greater reductions in machining time with Vortex compared to conventional roughing. The first change allows toolpaths to approach the part from outside the stock at the cutting height, both for open pockets and in areas where earlier cuts have made this possible. Previously, all entry moves had to be made by plunging onto the surface or by ramping into the material.  The second change allows an increased feed rate to be set for non-cutting moves. The default value is set at double the rate for the cutting moves but this can be altered as required for each machine tool.  The extra time that can be saved depends on the shape of the part but an additional saving of around 20% should be expected above the earlier releases of Vortex. Another problem in previous versions of PowerMILL was that unnecessary lifts could be added to area-clearance toolpaths when the cutter moved outside the stock or close to its edge.  Changes to the roughing algorithm in PowerMILL 2015 have reduced the number of lifts per toolpath slice to the minimum […]