The global economic slowdown has intensified competitive pressures as compared to what it used to be even a few years back. Manufacturing companies are now increasingly focusing on measures such as cost cutting and compressing product development time to suit the market cycles. In this scenario, manufacturers are now more inclined towards using new and advanced 3-D simulation tools, which significantly trim cost. These tools are also used to speed up product development with the help of highly advanced 3-D visualisations. By applying this technology, manufacturers can get highly realistic pictures of numerical control (NC) cutting toolpaths, enterprise-level digital manufacturing and product lifecycle management (PLM) systems.
At present, simulation software is being developed in many forms to cater to the growing demand of the manufacturing sector. It includes 3-D animations of the NC toolpath methods, complete machine-level simulation equipped with collision monitoring capabilities.
Benefits of advanced 3-D simulation tools
According to VC Satyavadi, Proprietor and Director of Sunex Precision Pvt Ltd, a mid-sized automobile component manufacturer based in Faridabad, “This kind of software can also be developed in the form of factory-floor planning and validation tools. With the help of these specialised tools, manufacturing companies can facilitate the process of metal cutting processes even before actually cutting the metals or confirming a factory design. Simulation software designed and developed in the recent years has led to a level of realism that was unachievable even few years back.”
 However, highly complex machine simulations or NC toolpath can pose significant computationally intensive obstacles for manufacturers. To overcome such obstacles, manufacturers often require highly efficient simulation software and high performing computers.
Rajesh S Kothari, CMD of Rohan Automotive Equipments Pvt Limited, an Ahmedabad-based mid-sized auto component maker, says, “This is a problem mainly with small and medium start-up companies that are not so technologically aware. To solve this problem, CGTech Corporation, a leading computer numerical control machine tools manufacturer, has developed the Vericut NC toolpath simulation software. This software helps manufacturers to precisely simulate the cutting-tool motions before cutting metals.”
Uniqueness of Vericut software
One of the unique features of the Vericut software is that it can run equally on Windows and Unix-based systems. With the help of this software, manufacturers can get NC and full machine simulation with less effort.
As compared to computer-aided design (CAD) or computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) systems, NC simulation and verification jobs lead to additional pressure on computer systems because it requires fast processors and large memory storage capacity to perform effectively. Mr Kothari, in this context adds, “Simulation tasks with the help of Vericut software generally require a high performance Windows-based PC with lot of built-in memory.”
The process of simulating an NC toolpath, generally impacts three important substations on a computer, namely - memory limits, computation limits and graphics limits.
The Vericut composite programming and simulation is one of the first machine-independent software packages that were developed for automatic fiber placement (AFP) machines. The need for this was prompted by the process technology required by Boeing 787 airplanes which was unavailable at that time. CGTech developed the advanced Vericut software, since Boeing was more interested in software that was machine-independent.
Anirban Guha |
