Five-axis machining with Delcam’s PowerMILL
|
Delcam’s latest release, PowerMILL 5, continues to expand and improve
on the strategies available for complex five?axis machining projects.
For example, secondary axis limiting has been added to ensure that the
program generated will not attempt to move outside any limits in the machine
tool’s range of movement. Contact point analysis allows the user
to ensure that only the cutting surface touches the component and that
rubbing with the shank is avoided, while contact point feed rate control
enables the feed rate to be set based on the cutting speed rather than
the rotation rate of the tool tip. This last enhancement is of great importance
when cutting some of the more difficult materials found in the aerospace
industry.
Five-axis drilling has also been improved to give faster drilling, more
comprehensive hole recognition (from a wider range of CAD systems) and
automatic capping of holes to prevent the milling cutter entering them.
PowerMILL 5 also has the ability to ignore surfaces that are not required
for a particular calculation. This option can be helpful when machining
products like aerospace blisks, where the same shape needs to be duplicated
a number of times within the component. The user can select the surfaces
making up the feature and instruct PowerMILL to ignore the remainder of
the model. The toolpaths generated can then be checked for collisions
with the rest of the model and once any necessary adjustments have been
made, they are copied around the model to produce the complete machining
program.
|
