Success Story
Fully Automatic and Adaptive Blade repair realized with Autodesk PowerMILL
Customer challenge
H&W Tool Earn contract award for scaling the 5 Axis CNC manufacturing process of titanium engine blades scaled to production quantities while achieving profitability.
Current processes include casting the blades, which leaves a variable amount of excess titanium on each blade. Which would result in having to process each blade uniquely. This process is vastly too time consuming to be scalable or profitable, each blade taking on average 2 hours of programming time.
Project goals
The way to achieve the scale required would be to have a more automated way to program each blade. This would require scanning each blade to determine the amount of this variable titanium that is cast into each particular blade. Then have some form of adaptive programming to rapidly generate the CNC programs with minimal interactions, thereby minimizing the exhaustive time to program each blade individually using traditional methods.
- Develop a process that would accommodate production level scale
- Expand throughput of programming department
- Reduce programming time
- Improve efficiency by reducing “air cutting”
- Ensure process is efficient at the shop floor level
Solution
Working with Design and Software (DSI), we were able to analyze the project and assess the desired outcome being requested. What DSI proposed was leveraging the Autodesk PowerMILL product along with the DSI Automation Framework to create a “no touch” fully automatic programming solution.
Each part would be blue light scanned and serialized. These serialized scans would then be processed automatically by applying several 5 Axis toolpaths from PowerMILL, considering the unique material conditions of each blade as they were cast.
Serialized traceability allowed for efficient part handling throughout the process all the way to the shop floor. This made the process easy and predictable without the need for high level operators.
Business outcome
As a result of the solution the contract was awarded and once the parts are loaded into the machine, it requires less than 1 minute of time for the fully adaptive toolpaths to begin the machining process.
Conclusion
Working with Design and Software this customer was able to reduce a process that required 2 hours of CNC programmer time and was able to reduce it to zero human time and only 1 minute of computational time. This reduced the programming cost of producing these parts as well as provided a solution that would allow the scale to produce these blades at production level quantities.
Project summary
- 55
- 2022-04-15
Duration & delivery
- Forge
- Forge
- Fusion 360
- Fusion 360 - Machining Extension
- Fusion 360 with PowerInspect
- Fusion 360 with PowerMill
- Fusion 360 with PowerShape
- Post Processor
- Forge
Autodesk solutions
- Assessment of Needs
- Implementation
- Process Automation
- Strategy & Planning
- Workflow Optimization
- CAM Programming
- Design for Manufacturing
- Machine Configuration
- Post Processor
- Tooling
- Software Development & Customization
- Installation
- Configuration & Deployment
- System Integration
- Training
Services provided
- Subtractive Manufacturing
Customer industry
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