A purchaser of a new machine might question the wisdom of optimizing a new machine, but there are many reasons optimization would be beneficial. New commodity machines are reliable, accurate, and well tuned straight from the factory. But the same machine tool purchased by one shop for mold and die making can also be used for high production mill-drill applications, or high accuracy aerospace or medical applications. In order to meet all these requirements and also maintain product standardization, the machines are tuned to “best fit” the variety of applications the machine was designed for. Optimization helps to tailor your machine performance to meet the particular application requirements of your industry. Through specialized tuning and the addition of features, CNC optimization for new machines can capitalize on the mechanical capabilities of your machine. Before attempting the optimization of a new machine tool, check with your machine tool builder to avoid any issues, which may affect your warranty. Also check with your machine tool builder to see if they offer any optimization services.

Older machines are prime candidates for optimization for a wide variety of reasons. Very often these machines are critical to production and costly to replace. As a machine is used, it wears and parts become loose. As a result, an older machine’s tuning and accuracy no longer meets factory specifications. Servo tuning was based on original machine specifications and may be too aggressive for the current machine conditions. This could lead to instabilities, poor surface finish and the inability to achieve machining speeds of which the machine was once capable. Compensations will most definitely need to be readjusted. Accuracy is affected by worn mechanics. Periodic compensation adjustments will keep the older machine’s accuracies to within tolerances. The addition of new types of compensation may be required as your machine ages (e.g., adding bidirectional pitch error or straightness compensation).

Features can be added to the CNC to allow the user to work around some of the mechanical deficiencies of an older machine and still provide optimal performance. Optimization allows your older machine to operate with the best possible performance within its mechanical capabilities. Another consideration for older machines would be a complete CNC retrofit. This should only be considered for machines in good mechanical shape or machines that would be difficult to replace, but the controls and servos—due to their age—are incapable of providing the performance and reliability of which the machine is capable. A thorough assessment of your older machine should be done by a qualified service person before attempting to optimize your machine. Screws, racks and ways need to be in good condition and not excessively worn or damaged. The machine positioning must be repeatable (it does not have to be accurate, inaccuracy can be compensated for, but that inaccuracy must be repeatable every time the machine returns to that position). If your machine is not repeatable, you have a much deeper problem that cannot be compensated for at the CNC level. Do not attempt to optimize a CNC on your own. Seek the advice of your machine tool builder or the CNC manufacturer. Optimization should only be performed by factory trained personnel. With its high quality products such as sand maker and professional Raymond mill, Hongxing Machinery has ascended in the front rank of the world in the exporting of mining equipment.

Servo tuning is one of the most basic optimization tools. Servo tuning can be done to any machine at any time and usually yields the best results. Many people take servo tuning for granted and fail to realize that servo performance is directly related to part finish and tolerance. Servo tuning could be adjusted (and should be checked periodically) at any stage in a machine tool’s life. Good servo tuning can help your machine tool achieve smoother more precise axes control, faster cycle times, better path accuracy and extended machine life. Following are benefits as they relate to servo tuning:

Smoother More Precise Axes Control: Machine tool servo systems are referred to as closed loop systems, which means that as a command is generated to move the axes, feedback is provided by the servo-controlled axis to confirm the axis is properly responding to the command. The command is constantly adjusted based on the feedback and command, in order to ensure the axis is following the program path. There are three basic servo control loops. The current loop is used to control the fine commutation of the motor as well as the application of the motor torque. The velocity loop is used to ensure the servo motor is running at the proper speed and that the speed is applied smoothly. The position loop is used to ensure the axes position is accurate, keeping the axes on the program path (Figure 2). Poorly tuned servo control loops can actually have the loops fighting each other resulting in instabilities and path errors. A well tuned servo control loop results from assuring that all the previously stated control loops are working together to provide the smoothest operation, quickest response, best possible path accuracy.

Faster Cycle Times: Servo tuning can aid in achieving faster cycle times in several ways. A well tuned servo system is capable of accelerating and decelerating the servo axes quicker and with less shock. The faster the axes can respond to speed changes in the part program, the shorter the overall cycle time can become. A well tuned servo system will also provide more stable operation at higher feed rates, allowing for faster cutting speeds (depending on and limited to machine condition, tooling and material). In addition, tuning a servo system will allow the axes to respond quicker to changes in axes load due to heavy cuts or inconsistent material.

Better Path Accuracy: As part of the servo tuning procedure, the loop gain for each control loop is adjusted to perform at its peak. The loop gain refers to the ability of the servo system to follow the program path. All servo systems lag the commanded position slightly. The amount of servo lag in an axes is directly related to how well tuned the servos are.

Servo lag also increases with speed. So a well tuned servo system allows for much higher position loop gains, which in turn, reduces the amount of servo lag—providing much closer path accuracy and a more precise part.

Extended Machine Life: A well tuned servo system accelerates and decelerates smoother and moves smoother. Because of this, mechanical shock to your machine is reduced extending the mechanical life of the machine. In addition, the ability of the axes to handle changes in cutting load—with little or no effect to servo response—allows the machine to maintain a constant velocity with no vibration, further reducing mechanical shock.

Spindle Tuning: Often spindle motors are overlooked in the tuning process. Tuning a spindle to optimize velocity control improves the spindle’s ability to maintain speed and reduces the possibility of tool chatter. Tuning and optimizing spindle acceleration performance provides better speed response, faster tapping cycles and more accurate threading cycles. Tuning positioning and orientation on a spindle helps with faster tool changes better positioning and a stable platform for probing. As a leading global manufacturer of crushing and milling equipment, we offer advanced, rational solutions for any size-reduction requirements, including quarry, aggregate, grinding production and complete stone crushing station. We also supply individual cone crusher and hammer crusher as well as spare parts of them.

Just as mold manufacturers are constantly looking for ways to streamline the mold design and build process while maintaining quality and accuracy as molds get more complex, they also wish to reduce the amount of suppliers with which they deal. It is more important than ever that a supplier not only sell equipment-but offer a variety and possess a working knowledge of the moldmaking process. Hot runner and components suppliers are listening to their customers. Hot runner systems and mold components are becoming more streamlined and standardized-increasing productivity, reducing maintenance and improving efficiencies. According to Dave Lange, Director of Sales at DME Company (Madison Heights, MI), moldmakers face application hurdles that include: challenging part shape/geometry, required higher cavitations and volume and in-mold assembly, increased end market regulations and improved part cosmetics. “All of the advances we are seeing in hot runners, components and anything else relating to moldmaking are coming from customer demand for reduced overall tooling costs, reduced design time and overall leadtime,” Lange states. Below, a number of major suppliers join Lange in weighing in on where they believe the markets are heading.

Michael Ellis, Director, Sales Support and Marketing for Mold-Masters Ltd. (Georgetown, ON), notes that the most common questions molders and moldmakers ask the company is regarding materials used, hot runner balance and warranties. “Variables, such as material toughness, wear rates, thermal profile, etc. are all key to a moldmaker’s ability to create a good, durable and long-lasting mold,” he elaborates. “Something that is critical in ensuring that their customers—the molders and end users—maximize the uptime of their molding processes. This is why we spend so much time testing and developing new materials and designs that continuously increase the longevity of our systems.” Hot runner balance is key in order to mold a good part, Ellis continues, affecting everything from part fill rate to color change. “A variety of factors affects hot runner balance, but the manufacturing of the manifold and the thermal profile of the entire system are two variables that have the most impact,” he states. “Because we use brazed-in heaters with optimal heat profile, plus our nozzle design allows for thermocouples to be installed close to the gate for accurate thermal readings, our entire hot runner system ensures an accurate heat profile. We have also developed special technology manifolds to ensure that all internal runners are optimized with no sharp corners or dead zones-allowing the melt to flow through the channels without any obstructions.”

Moldmakers commonly ask Synventive Molding Solutions (Peabody, MA) what the company can do to help them keep down costs and simplify installations, notes its Chief Engineer Bill Rousseau. “Synventive puts a strong emphasis on satisfying this request with everything we develop, including a product that greatly reduces the time required to integrate a valve gate hot runner into the mold and prepare it for first article testing,” he states.” Tony Brusca, President of Alba Enterprises Inc. (Rancho Cucamonga, CA), notes that his customers ask questions like how fast can they get a quote; and can Alba process high-end technical materials. Over at HASCO America, Inc. (Fletcher, NC), Brenda Clark, Applications Engineer and Inside Sales Manager, says the common moldmaker questions are about applications in areas like cost reduction, increased productivity, cleanroom technology, improved service life, maintainability, cycle time abbreviation, reduction of wear and improved energy efficiency. With its high quality products such as impact crusher and professional jaw crusher, Hongxing Machinery has ascended in the front rank of the world in the exporting of mining equipment.

Nikki Cusworth, a quality improvement technician at power systems giant Rolls-Royce, has won the UK"s Inspirational Technician Award. The Award, supported by young people"s charity STEMNET and Lord Sainsbury"s Gatsby Foundation, was given in recognition of her work mentoring local school girls interested in technical careers, and introducing primary school children to fun engineering related projects and paper bridge-building exercises in the classroom.

Accepting the award, Ms Cusworth said: "If I am successful in encouraging others to follow in my footsteps, it is because I get excited when I talk about my job. As a technician, you are really valued by your employers and I hope that by working with young people, I can inspire them to find a rewarding career, which they will love as much as I do." The introduction of the Inspirational Technician Award follows recognition by government of a shortage of technicians, particularly in Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM) areas in the UK. Last year"s National Strategic Skills Audit described the role of technicians as a "high priority area of critical importance to the economy". Through this new award, STEMNET and Gatsby aim to improve public perceptions of a profession in high demand by employers.

The award is one of five categories within The National STEMNET Awards 2011, sponsored by the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC). The prizes celebrate the achievements of thousands individuals, schools and businesses in inspiring young people in Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths. The winners were announced by Lord Sainsbury of Turville and the Rt. Hon Dr Vince Cable MP, Secretary of State for the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, at an event in the House of Lords held on 13 December. The winners all receive an exclusive visit to CERN as part of their prize, courtesy of STFC and CERN. Kirsten Bodley, STEMNET, chief executive, said: "STEMNET aims to address the employer demand for technical skills and support young people in understanding their value. We plan to do this by providing support for schools and other youth organisations trying to demonstrate the career paths into these key jobs.

"Our activities benefit more than 600,000 young people every year and leverage over £7 million per annum into STEM support for schools and colleges through in-kind support from employers and volunteers. We hope that through this award, we can add to this work and encourage a change in how the public, and young people in particular, view a career as a technician."

Lord Sainsbury said: "The UK benefits from a huge network of people dedicated to inspiring young people in STEM. Their commitment and hard work is paying dividends - in the last five years the numbers taking Physics and Chemistry A-levels have increase by around 20%, and, perhaps most significantly, Maths A-level is up by nearly 50%. The prizes awarded today recognise the most inspirational individuals and organisations for the ways in which they have been motivating young people in STEM, enabling them to access new skills and hopefully get better paid and more exciting jobs when they enter the world of work." As a leading global manufacturer of crushing and milling equipment, we offer advanced, rational solutions for any size-reduction requirements, including quarry, aggregate, grinding production and complete stone crushing station. We also supply individual ore beneficiation machines and dryer machine as well as spare parts of them.

The steel ball grinder has been widely applied in the domestic and foreign heat-engine plants, however, there still exit some problems that are badly in need of resolution in its using process, for example, it is difficult to realize automatic control for the whole powder manufacturing process and operating in the best state is even more difficult. The powder manufacturing system in the ball grinder is a controlled station that has such characteristics as multivariable time lag and coupling and time varying, but the existing control system is a regulating system that has three sets of independent routine PID so that it is difficult to take a comprehensive consideration to the specific features of the powder production system, for example, it cannot eliminate the mutual interference between the return circuit or overcome the large time lag and varying. In addition, because there exists pressure difference in the entrance and exit of the machine and the vibrating signal is influenced by the types, nature of the coal and the overload of the balls, the signals cannot reflect the coal reserves inside the grinding equipment, for this reason, it is extremely difficult to adjust the overload and the relevant automatic regulating system exits in name only. Even though the operational personnel control it manually, it often occur that surveillance negligence leading to positive pressure, coal leakage and blockage and adjusting to the best economic state is even more difficult which will cause high energy and cost consumption in the powder manufacturing process.

There are a lot of input and output variables in the powder production system of the ball mill. If design the whole controls system as the whole and control in a multivariable way, the whole design process and the control algorithm will be very difficult. For this reason, we will have to divide it into several relatively independent subsystems according to its specific features. First of all, by analyzing the dynamical property of the ball mill, the warm and cold blast rate has prominent influences on the entrance negative pressure and exit temperature, so that we can treat this process as a 2X2 multivariable object, and the two input quantity are hot wind control valve aperture and cold wind control valve aperture, and the two output variables are entrance negative pressure and exit temperature. In allusion to the multivariable object our company designs a multivariable fuzzy control system. In addition, because the load of the ball mill is a relatively independent system, the biggest problem of this system is the regulated variable cannot be precisely predicted so that the closed-loop control system cannot work normally. Directing at this feature, we put up with a optimum self-adaption open-loop control method based on the principle of minimizing the electricity consumption so that we can avoid the measurement of the workload of the grinder, thus making sure the whole powder manufacturing system can work in a energy-saving state. As a professional grinding crushing machine such as rotary kiln manufacturing company, I believe you can always trust us in providing you with the excellent products and the best services.

The European Machine Tool industry, represented by CECIMO, has launched a European initiative focused on sustainability: the Blue Competence Machine Tools initiative. The Blue Competence initiative (BluECOmpetence) is led by Germany"s mechanical engineering association, VDMA, with activities up to now centred on that country. The machine tool industry is the first mechanical engineering sector to embark on a broad-based campaign on sustainability at European level. Under the initiative, companies agree to meet pre-determined ecological, economic and social values and principles, while implementing sustainable production solutions in their production plants, products and business services, with the aim of achieving greener manufacturing. The initiative is in line with EU policy developments and priorities.

Martin Kapp, president of CECIMO, said: "This landmark initiative underlines the willingness of European machine tool builders to make a leap forward towards a better and greener manufacturing perspective. Production technology and equipment supplied by the machine tool industry is the key enabler of resource efficient processes in all other manufacturing industries. Now, our manufacturers are taking on a firm commitment to align, in a holistic approach, their products, processes and business models with sustainability principles." Filip Geerts, director general of CECIMO, added: "Blue Competence Machine Tools is about "competitiveness", "environment" and "quality of life". It highlights the contribution that the machine tool and other manufacturing industries are making to economic and social life as well as to the protection of environment. CECIMO expects the initiative to profoundly influence business and manufacturing practices in the sector; to stimulate technical innovation; and to raise awareness about the role of manufacturing in driving sustainability.

"Blue Competence Machine Tools is an excellent example of partnership in which industries work together to tackle the common challenges we face in Europe." To meet the trend of modernization development and the needs of international markets competition, our company has been introducing senior management personnel, scientific and research talents, and advanced graduates continually. And we are taking advantages of advanced technology from United States, Germany, Japan and other countries to achieve self-innovation and effective development.

Our company has been adhering to the concept of "people-oriented, customer supremacy, development and innovation". We are able to provide our customers not only the highest quality products at the most favorable price, but also the most reasonable suggestion of equipments, optimum process configuration, and a full range of technical support. In pursuit of bringing customers the most benefits with minimal investment, we have been trying our best to help customers in any case! As a leading global manufacturer of crushing and milling equipment, we offer advanced, rational solutions for any size-reduction requirements, including quarry, aggregate, grinding production and complete stone crushing station. We also supply individual cone crusher and dryer machine as well as spare parts of them.

The base component of the ore mill not only supports the whole weight of the machine, but bears the dynamic load resulted from the impact and vibration produced by the operation of the equipment. The loading capacity and the stability of the base are the most important factors that relate to normal work of the devices and at the same time, we should make sure that the base will be submerge or crack in the operational process of the mill, for this reason, the base of the equipment should be installed onto the solid foundation, and is has high and strict requirement to the weight of the steel concrete which must be two point five to three times of the grinder. The base cannot be linked together with the footing of the wall or the pillars of the plant and under normal circumstances, the distances between them should be kept 1 meter and at the same at least 40 to 50 mm. If the distance is too small, the workers should fill with the slab stone in order to prevent the vibration of the building during the operation of the ore mill.

Before the installment of the ball mill, the workers should examine and check carefully the relative position relations between the base and the adjacent buildings and structures and the adjacent machine sets and make sure the their distances are conformed to the stipulations on the design drawing. There are many methods in the examination process, for example, measure with the measuring apparatus from a certain fiducial point or measure using bracing wire. All these methods are used in order to find out exactly the mutual position relations between them and figure out precisely their main sizes, for example, make sure the horizontal distance, depth of parallelism and verticality, levelness and relative altitude difference of the axis of the ball mill, the gear axis of the reduction box and the axis of the motor and what is more, in order to make sure whether the position and dimension of the obligate hole of the foundation bolt are conformed to the requirement of the design paper and the actual production conditions and whether the actual size of the screw hole on the bottom of the ball mill are all the same. After the check and examination work is confirmed and the workers can maker sure that various kinds of parameters are exact without error, then they can proceed to the installment work after figuring out the positions and sizes.

In addition, before the installment of the ball mill, the technicians should examine uniformly and completely all the ore beneficiation equipment in order to make sure whether the equipment are all in readiness and whether there is any defects and whether they are conformed to the installment and working requirement and in the meantime cleanse the main parts of the machines and inject oil into them.