Move from manual processes to automated solutions for smart manufacturing success
Florida's advanced manufacturing industries are diverse and include sectors producing intermediate and finished products ranging from plastics and micro-electronics to tortillas and motor vehicles.
After three years of work, military researchers are near the end of a project to find a faster, cheaper way to make tools for large aerospace parts like skins for wings and fuselages.
Horizontal machining centers (HMCs) are versatile four-axis and, increasingly, five-axis machine platforms that maximize processing of multi-sided large parts by minimizing part handling.
Erik Anderson, president and CEO of Basin Precision Machining LLC, has determined that setups are the root of all evil when it comes to manufacturing productivity. They cause part variations, downtime, and high-percentage scrap rates.
Smart factory systems benefit from improved technologies, as well as proven applications.
On June 22-23, SME hosted a Smart Manufacturing Working Group meeting at Texas A&M University (College Station, TX) followed by an international workshop on Smart Manufacturing for the Factory of the Future.
I just returned from IMTS in Chicago and my first thought was, “where will I be able to rack up all those bonus steps I got last week?” On the easiest day, I walked 7.9 miles, and I topped 10 miles on two other days. It’s easy to understand why.
In a perfect CNC world, the first part is always a good one. There’s no need for extra blanks or barstock. Setup times are only as long as is needed to swap out a few tools and load a new program. There’s never a crash, never the need to reprogram an inefficient bit of code. The operator just pushes the green button and out pops a finished workpiece minutes or hours later.
Drilling advancements have spurred the evolution of oil and gas operations from simplistic single-well pad fields to more complex multi-well pads. Today, many producers are using fracking and lateral drilling techniques to place 10 or more wells on one pad.