SpinOffs

As discussed in my previous blog post, Flank Milling, How Hard Can it Be?, turbomachinery blades are commonly designed as ruled surfaces, with the goal of making manufacturing easier and faster with flank-milling.  While some non-ruled surfaces can be acceptably flank-milled, the programming and machining process for flank-milling is generally more dependable with ruled data. However, the ruled data should be well conditioned, and several pitfalls should be avoided during the design and construction process.

Valentine’s Day is February 14, and while some cynics refer to it as a “Hallmark holiday”, most people commemorate the day in some way. One of the biggest challenges is finding a card that perfectly captures the way you feel about someone, while also reflecting who you are.  Well, Concepts NREC has created some turbomachinery-themed Valentine’s Day cards for engineers. These fall into the Art end of our Art-to-Part Solution.

 When designing compressors, engineers often use ruled-surface blades with the goal of making a shape that’s easily manufactured on a 5-axis machine.  Theses blades can be quickly machined in one pass by aligning the side of a cutting tool to the rulings. This process is often referred to as “flank milling.”  The alternative is to make many passes with the tool tip, a process known as “point milling”. For the right application, flank milling is often favored for shorter cutting times and better surface quality, but there are some caveats.

Gifts for Engineers can usually be segmented into a few categories: Things you have to put together, science fiction, gaming, new technology, and witty phrases printed on stuff. A Google search of the term "Best Gifts for Engineers" will quickly validate this claim.

I think we can all agree that designing turbomachinery is hard. There are just so many moving parts (pun intended) in the design process, and they are all interconnected.  When you change the blade shape, it changes the aerodynamics, and could impact manufacturability. Everything you change has a cascading effect across many different areas, because all of the areas are linked; just like a Rubik's^® cube! Only, in turbomachinery design, you are not always trying to get all of the sides to be one color. Heck, even a 3-year old can do that. 

The guiding principle behind Concepts NREC’s Computer-Aided Manufacturing (CAM) software, MAX-PAC, is to simplify the task of creating efficient milling toolpaths for turbomachinery. Since we are also users of MAX-PAC in our manufacturing facility, we see first-hand how new features and functionality impact day-to-day operations. This was true with the release of our powerful 3+2 Roughing Module. After a year of using it, our machinists were amazed at the results. In almost every instance, they saw a 50% reduction in roughing cycle times, compared to the way they were doing 5-axis roughing. Wow!

Concepts NREC just had its most successful year ever in software sales. Why? It really comes down to two things, the first is our team, we have some incredibly talented people developing our software and then training, supporting and selling it. The second, is our singular focus on turbomachinery. We are the only company in the world that offers turbomachinery specific CAM and CAE software. We do not try to be everything to everyone and produce machining toolpaths for any product or the ability to analyze anything. We focus on turbomachinery.

Wouldn’t it be ironic if the profession that is creating all the robots was eventually replaced by them? It could happen. Engineering is all about applying laws, measurements, facts, and analysis to solve a problem. Dealing with these finite things is exactly what robots do WAY better than people.

A common struggle for mechanical engineers using Computer Aided Engineering (CAE) tools is the time-consuming process of moving geometry between the CAE system and Computer Aided Design (CAD) software. This blog will explore ways to reduce time spent on this process.