A study on the design of CNC lathe for education and application
Abstract As the factory automation progresses, the number of specialized products increases rapidly. Furthermore, there is an increased need for engineers trained in CAD/CAM for process design and operation. This development necessitates thorough and systematic education in CAD/CAM and educational numerical control machine tools. Inexpensive educational CNC machine tools will facilitate the required education in Korea. In this study we design and manufacture a prototype of an inexpensive CNC lathe. This will facilitate the CNC education in Korea as these activities become active. The designed CNC lathe has power rating of 0.5 kW and includes a CPU board, main motor board, step motor board, and power supply board. The specification for lathe meets the KS and DIN standards.
Enhancing Undergraduate Understanding of Subtractive Manufacturability through Virtualized Simulation of CNC Machining
The design process can often introduce manufacturing challenges, and designers must be able to understand these challenges in order to minimize them. Frequently, the experience level of mechanical engineering students is insufficient for them to consider the limitations that manufacturing processes impose upon design, and they often design parts that are either difficult or impossible to manufacture. This work describes the development, implementation, and analysis of a system used to rapidly provide students with the knowledge they need to consider manufacturing challenges for machining processes. An experimental group of students was trained in the use of a software package (SculptPrint) that provides visualizations of the turning process and taught how to operate various computer numerical control (CNC) machine tools. A separate control group of students was trained on the operation of manual machine tools and did not receive access to the turning visualizations. Knowledge assessments were given to both groups to measure their understanding of a variety of topics in manufacturability. Analysis of the survey results indicates that student understanding of geometrical limitations in the turning process can be dramatically improved by employing visualizations of manufacturing processes.
Transformation from availability expression to failure frequency expression
The problem of computing the system's Failure Frequency is reduced to the problem of computing its Availability. This is performed by a transformation operator. However, the existing transformation operator is not practical because its transformation time increases exponentially with system size. To overcome this difficulty, this paper proposes a new method of transforming the Availability expression of a system into the corresponding Failure Frequency expression of the system. This method is based on a matrix approach using a 2 /spl times/ 2 matrix consisting of 0, Availability, and Failure Frequency in an appropriate manner. This transformation also enables algorithms for computing the Availability of a system to be transformed into algorithms for computing its Failure Frequency by replacing parameters and operations with matrix parameters and operations. The computation time after transformation is linear with respect to the original Availability algorithm. This implies that the problems of computing other well-known reliability measures including, Availability, Unavailability, MTBF, MTTR, MCT, Failure Rate, Failure Rate, and Failure Frequency, are reduced to only the Availability computation problem.