Manufacturing Applications
The Axis Motion profile cutting system is a complete control system designed and developed over six years. During this time it has been used, for example, on:
· flat bed laser, plasma, router and water jet profilers,
· engraving machines and
· special applications on punching, milling and lathe machines.
The system is currently being used in the following industrial applications:
· Woodworking and furniture making: the tools being used are lasers and routers;
· Machine and boat manufacture: routers cutting aluminium;
· Heavy metal cutting: plasma cutting head and water table;
· Plastics fabrication: laser cutting;
· Special purpose machines: punch machines; lathes;
· Driving heavy duty milling machines: the motor pulses directly drive servo-motor controllers.
Typical Machine Specification
A typical profiling machine using this system has:
· rack and pinion, ballscrew or belt drives
· moving gantries 0.5 to 3 metres wide and weighing between 5 and 80 kilograms
· tables from 0.5 to 20 metres long
· interpolating speeds of 12 to 15 metres/minute
· a z axis usually driven by a ball screw and carrying cutting heads from 1 kilogram laser optics to 20 kilogram routers.
On any machine the achievable speed, acceleration and resolution depends on a combination of friction, cutter force, mass and gearing. The most common use is on laser cutting machines and routing machines with gantry mass of 60 to 80 kilograms, low bearing, seal and drive frictions, with a gear ratio such that 1 revolution of the motor corresponds to 20 millimetres of motion. A microstep setting of 5000 steps/rev gives a resolution of 250 steps/mm and will accelerate at 800mm/s/s to speeds of 12 to 15 metres/minute. This means that a speed of 12metres/minute is achieved in 0.25 seconds over a distance of 25mm (slightly longer with S-curve acceleration).
Figure 1 Laser machine
Figure 2 Hand console on laser machine
Figure 3 Laser optics head with height control and a cut sample