Louis Belet

Gaining Competitive Edge with Machining Modeling

Louis Belet was looking to accelerate its tool design time to respond to a customer request for a Stainless Steel Hole Drilling operation. Being in a highly competitive space, the ability to shorten the time-to-market timelines for a product is a critical success factor for winning customer trust and business. Louis Belet approached Third Wave Systems to understand if machining modeling technology could be an effective tool to achieve their goals for quicker product launches.

CHALLENGE

The standard drill was experiencing excessive wear on the cutting-edge periphery as seen in the image below. The first step in such a scenario is to reduce the speed with the understanding that lower speed should result in lower temperature and, hopefully, less wear. However, there are usually several factors that determine the wear. While the experimental testing is required to get the final design, the associated costs of the material, prototyping and the time it takes to arrive at the final design makes it difficult to respond to ever-changing customer demands. Louis Belet wanted to compress time-to-market for their products launches.

APPROACH

Machining modeling using AdvantEdge was used to understand the problem in better detail. It allowed Louis Belet to prepare numerous virtual designs to see the impact of aspects like edge preparation and the correct combination of speeds and feeds. The analysis helped uncover that beyond the increased temperature, the Max Principal Stress was a key issue. This discovery helped guide the prototype development to focus on designs that reduced the stress.

IMPACT

Using AdvantEdge to design the stainless steel drill generated the following results:

  • Time to market reduced from 6 months to 3 months
  • Number of prototypes required for testing reduced from 31 to 10
  • Testing time reduced from 60 hours to 30 hours. Allowed for more testing on promising designs
  • Despite the first-time use, the learning curve was very short as AdvantEdge is designed for modeling machining processes

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