Does NX6 have a similar function as Vericut's OPTIPATH? 1

[dreamstar]

HI,

I was wondering if there was a way to have "variable" cutting feed rates in NX6 as there is in Vericut with their OPTIPATH? Basically optipath varies the cutting feed rates according to actual material being removed, for instance it's going to increase the cutting feed rates on straight lines.

I know NX6 has a bunch of different settings for non-cutting moves, but is there a way to have actual VARIABLE cutting feed rates?

If not, can we expect that from NX7?

regards
Max

 

[JohnRBaker]

Note that I'm not a manufacturing expert, however this is the response that I got back when I asked one of our development people who is an expert in this field.

NX does not currently support this capability as we have concentrated in the past on creating tool-paths which inherently are more efficient based on the use of other techniques such as changing the local motion of the tool relative to the cutting surface so as to maintain a high feed rates. However that being said, we have had many requests for this capability and so a project has been added to the NX 7.5 program which will provide this as an enhancement to our NC tool-path generation code.

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Design Solutions
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Cypress, CA

http://www.siemens.com/plm

http://www.plmworld.org/museum/

To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

 

[dreamstar]

John,

Thank you for inquiring about that with your manufacturing gurus. THAT'S GREAT NEWS. I am certain that it will be one of the most exciting feature of NX 7.5 (as far as CAM of course), as this capability will increase productivity by up to 30%. With Vericut you can import any NC programs (from any CAM software), "pass it through" OPTIPATH and voila!.. all your cutting feed rates are now optimized, or become variable if you will, which makes a HUGE difference and saves a lot of time in manufacturing parts. I don't believe any other software can do that, so it would be a huge advantage of using NX..

When can we expect the NX 7.5 release?

Thank you, and keep up the good work.

Max

 

[wmalan]

"and voila!.." Almost - after it's been setup. <g> Optipath does take a bit of time to setup. I think the machine building portion of Vericut is much easier to implement than NX's ISV.

Hopefully now the machine building portion of NX will start to take off (hint: much more documentation and tutorials!).

Me, I don't have access to Vericut anymore so I've really focused on learning the ISV. Necessity is the morther of... Building the ISV machines is still a work in progress for me but nesessary. We machine turbine parts (blades, blisks, shrouded impellers) and found that careful attention to toolaxis control for reduction of rotary movement saved me many hours. We have a lot of older machines with slow rotary rapids.

I think as these economic times get tougher, folks will invest more time into ISV as it is already part of the multi-axis bundle as opposed to paying another $30k+ more for each seat of Vericut.

--
Bill

 

[JohnRBaker]

Note that according to our NX development people, we are currently using alternative techniques which alters the type of step-over and the shape of the cutting path so rather than adjusting the feed-rate, this adjusts the actual amount of material removed for each rotation of the cutting tool. In many cases the end results are very similar in terms of the total cutting time. This is of particular importance when doing high-speed machining where small step-overs are commonplace and the goal is to maintain consistent, rapid tool movements.

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Design Solutions
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Cypress, CA

http://www.siemens.com/plm

http://www.plmworld.org/museum/

To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.