Efficient machining of large and medium batches of workpieces

To be successful, a manufacturing company must have the ability to respond quickly, that is, to respond quickly to increasingly fierce and instantaneous market demands. Only with this ability to respond means that it has a high probability of success.

In order to be able to respond quickly to the ever-changing market demands, companies need to adopt highly flexible equipment for their production processes. The overall production often has to adapt to new types of workpieces, changing number of workpieces and other changes in a very short time. But the premise is that these matches will not incur excessive additional costs.

Production equipment is easy to change and install

As a manufacturer of precision machine tools, WemaVogtland mainly manufactures flexible production equipment that can realize high-volume and medium-volume cutting and is a partner of many well-known automobile manufacturers in the world. In order to cater to the general trend of easy replacement of production equipment, the company has developed a modular structure of HPCFlex-V equipment. This kind of machining center can be used alone or in the production chain of overall processing. In addition, for high-volume production processes, it can also be integrated into the conveying system. The cost of operation and feeding can be reduced to a very low level.

In order to be able to quickly adapt to new processing tasks, different structural schemes can be adopted, and up to 5 axes can be used. Since the equipment adopts a modular structure and can be matched at will, the structure of the equipment can be well matched with various processing tasks. For different subsequent processing task requirements, the equipment can be converted to another configuration by adding or reinstalling. Special modules such as flat turning heads, multi-axis drills and assembly stations can be integrated into the production chain system, so that the auxiliary time can be shortened by feeding different production times.

HPCFlex-V100 single-axis machining center and HPCFlex-V200 dual-axis machining center form the basis for the realization of the above technical solutions. This horizontal machining center can be equipped with different worktables or pallet changing devices, which can realize 3-axis, 4-axis and 5-axis machining.

Single-axis processing equipment can achieve the highest flexibility of replacement. For simple processing procedures and medium number of workpieces, the machining center only needs to be equipped with a simple circular table (B axis). In addition, this model can also be equipped with pallet changers and loading and reloading positions. The third solution for single-axis equipment is to equip a revolving beam as a horizontal axis (A-axis), and optionally a circular table, so that 5-axis machining can be realized.

For the highest production efficiency use occasions, the dual-axis technical solution is an ideal solution. This solution can also be installed arbitrarily: two round tables (B axis), two round tables with a pallet changing device, and two round tables (B axis) as the horizontal axis The revolving beam (A axis), which can realize efficient 5-axis machining. All these components are part of the standard modular system and are developed from the customer's special processing plan.

Use flexible processing system as needed

The processing equipment of Volkswagen in Chemnitz is one example, which can show the situation of such processing technology solutions (Figure 2 and 3). The challenge the company faces is to convert the processing of the previous Polo three-cylinder Otto engine into a GolfV 2-1 four-cylinder pump fuel injection engine. In contrast to the previous large-scale equipment with a long design period and large processing capacity, what is needed here is a highly flexible processing system that is gradually invested according to demand. For the processing of aluminum cylinder housings, Chemnitz Volkswagen decided to use two two-axis round table conveyors. The equipment is equipped with three HPCFlex-V200 dual-axis processing modules on its pallet conveying device. The equipment used integrates the advantages of a machining center, a transmission line and a circular turntable multi-station machine tool. This is the best example of how a standard machining center can be linked into a highly flexible processing equipment.

Compared with the traditional mass processing equipment solution, the above-mentioned circular turntable conveying technology solution has some advantages. The traditional circular turntable multi-station machine tool has a large central processing table with a fixed or rotary clamping device on the rotating table. Since the processing station is fixedly installed, the error of the device cannot be corrected in time. The resulting deviation is a big defect for the machining accuracy required today. The circular table conveyor equipment is different: just like a single processing center, each processing station is equipped with an NC.