OPEN MIND Technologies USA demonstrates New hyperMAXX® application at AQA event

OPEN MIND Technologies USA demonstrated a new hyperMAXX application during a technology seminar in Montreal on November 15. hyperMAXX is a high-performance roughing module based on Celeritive Inc’s Volumill(tm) toolpath kernel. OPEN MIND has partnered with Celeritive and integrated this technology into hyperMILL since 2010. The latest hyperMILL release includes a new application by incorporating the hyperMAXX module with OPEN MIND’s 5-axis shape offset roughing routine.

Shape-offset provides simple programming of curved and formed surfaces using 5-axis techniques. Programming is quite simple through a user selection only of a bottom surface. All boundaries and depths are determined automatically by the system.

The range of application is broader than just for simple cylindrical surfaces. For curved shapes such as engine casings, tire moulds, roll-dies, and aerospace structural components, traditional Z-level roughing approaches would not match the ultimate surface. A series of Z-level slices would leave significant “stair-steps” and extra air cuts. Subsequent semi-finish and finish operations in the traditional approach would face uneven stock removal, greater impact on cutters, and thereby increasing the processing time and cost.

The new technique using the hyperMAXX tool path layout has had very positive results on increased cutter life, especially in high-temperature alloys. The control within hyperMAXX focuses on challenging machining areas such as entry and exit moves and corner cutting. Feedrates and step-over distances are modified dynamically, providing great improvement over traditional feedrates values and cutting technique that are generally set for an entire job to manage a small subset of challenging areas.

The seminar was sponsored by AQA ( www.aqa.ca), the Quebec Aerospace Association, which provides information and technology to small and medium business in the aerospace sector. It was co-hosted by the Canadian National Research Council, who is an OPEN MIND licensee, and also offered machine access for live cutting on their DMU 100 duoBlock machine. Emuge Corp (West Boylston MA) supplied cutters and was a guest speaker. The event attracted nearly 40 aerospace professionals.