High Speed Machining

Airbus/Univ. Bordeaux, Sandvik Coromant, and STEP Tools demonstrated the use of High Speed of nominal machining process plans with STEP-NC and validated improved approaches for representing large volumes of toolpath curves.

The original toolpath curves used a STEP trimmed_curve based on an underlying circle representation. While this works fine, a new representation for arcs and helix curves using via points within a polyline was tested and resulted in a 50% reduction in data volume, making the AP238 file with full toolpath, part geometry, stock geometry, and tolerance information smaller than the originating CAM file and roughly the size of an equivalent toolpath-only Heidenhain G-code file. The specifics are described in the presentation below.

Bordeaux Machining [wmv, 53M]

Bordeaux Vericut Test [wmv, 40M]