Design to production down from days to minutes

Callender Aeropart in Altham, Lancs reckons its cut the design to production time for its fan, compressor and turbine airfoil components, in some cases from days to minutes, by using EDS’ Unigraphics’ CAD/CAM software. The firm, which serves the aerospace engine and power generation equipment industries, says its implementation not only helps generate the designs quickly, but goes on to generate the tool path programs for manufacture in its advanced facilities. Callender says the key was application software developed for it by EDS. This draws on the parametric assembly modelling and knowledge-based engineering software tools in Unigraphics. They enable Callender’s engineers to use non-geometric data relating to the performance of each section within a customer’s turbine in order to create a surface model of an individual blade within the section. From this a 3D solid model of the blade is then produced, followed by the NC tool path program to machine it, all within Unigraphics. More importantly, the software also enables a complete set of blades for a turbine section, each of which will be different depending on the performance data, to be generated, or ‘morphed’ automatically from the first one simply by changing the performance values. The NC tool path programs are then automatically recalculated accordingly for each one. The actual machining of the turbine blades has also been reduced from a five-stage process to a single pass using high-speed, simultaneous 5-axis machining techniques, with the machine tools being driven by the NC programs developed with the Unigraphics CAM software modules.