Projects in Brazil

In tool and die making it is a constant challenge to increase preciseness, and to reduce production time and costs when manufacturing complex geometries and work piece surfaces. High velocity milling and five-axe free form processing with machine tools crucially contribute to increasing productivity.

But there is still demand and potential for increasing the attainable production accuracy and quality of work piece surfaces within the entire CAD-CAM-CNC process chain. The BRAGECRIM project “Holistic Optimization of Sculptured Surfaces Manufacturing (HoliMan)” aims at holistically optimizing five-axe free form processing, regarding all influences and factors within the machining process that affect the quality of the work piece to be manufactured.

This begins with defining machining strategies in a CAM system, describing the trajectories for the machining instrument and interpolating them when the CNC control unit of the machine executes the machining program. In particular, the project considers the static and dynamic machine properties and their impact on the work piece surface in free form processing.

Aside from these error sources, the project investigates the impact of measuring systems on the estimation of production accuracy in free forms during the machining process. Methods for automatically deriving compensation strategies from the analysis of a work piece in order to optimize the machining result are developed.

Within HoliMan, Fraunhofer IPK and the IWF of the TU Berlin develop a virtual machine for monitoring the machining process. It simulates machine behavior and the physical processes within the machining operation in real-time and can therefore supervise the physical machine and optimize process parameters parallel to machine operation.