Aerospace Engineering & Manufacturing Magazine has a great article highlighting the success of the award-winning NCMS-CTMA Volumetric Accuracy for Large Machine Tools (VALMT) project.
…One of the most vexing catch-22s in large-part machining appears to have finally been caught. Rapid volumetric compensation for high accuracy in large-scale five-axis machining is now within the grasp of the manufacturing community.
Why is this significant? Large components are often painstakingly crafted from numerous smaller components because the best machining technologies are not accurate enough to achieve the tight tolerances on large monolithic parts that could reduce part count and assembly time
…A joint project of the National Center for Manufacturing Sciences called Volumetric Accuracy for Large Machine Tools (VALMT)—involving Mag Industrial Automation Systems, Automated PrecisionInc. (API), Boeing, and Siemens—recently completed development of a rapid, and hence game-changing, approach to volumetric error compensation. Created especially for large and multi-axis machines, the system achieves the goals set by the design consortium: to reduce the downtime needed to determine necessary volumetric compensations from weeks to a day or less via a simple automated process that improves a machine tool’s volumetric performance by 50% or more.
