FEATURE ON PROFILING

Prima Power unveils latest innovations

Many new technologies and solutions by Prima Power had their world premiere at Blechexpo in Stuttgart last week. For instance, the top-of-the-range Laser Genius 1530 laser cutter with a Combo Tower Laser automation system was showcased for the first time with a 10 kW fibre laser source by IPG Photonics, which further boosts its performance, especially on thicker materials.

This product configuration is particularly suited to market sectors where heavier gauges are commonly used, such as agriculture and construction. Thanks to its laser head with adaptive optics for the automatic management of the focal position, Laser Genius is said to provide high quality and maximum speed without compromise on the whole thickness range for a wide variety of materials, including mild steel, stainless steel, aluminium, copper and brass.
Novel machine architecture based on a synthetic granite frame and carbon-fibre cantilever structure, along with linear drives, are some of its other key technical features. Laser Genius is managed by the user-friendly Prima Power Open CNC, while the HMI framework is the new Prima Power Tulus Laser 2D, a logical, modern interface that applies the existing Tulus platform and its ecosystem to 2D laser cutting machines.
At Blechexpo, the machine was equipped with a Combo Tower Laser flexible storage system featuring integrated loading and unloading features. The Combo Tower Laser has been developed and manufactured by Prima Power specifically for 2D laser machines.
For further information www.primapower.com

Integrated laser cutting from Citizen

Citizen Machinery’s fully integrated laser processing into the turn-milling cycle of its Cincom CNC sliding head lathes enables near endless possibilities for the creation of geometric shapes or precision holes into solid bar material which has been pre-drilled within the same production cycle or directly into tubular bar material.

The development opens the metal cutting process to producing burr-free holes as small as 0.2 mm diameter, produce features such as spiral cuts with 0.025 mm kerf width and maintain consistent and accurate radii less than 0.1 mm in corners of slots without any risk of tool wear or breakage. These can also be produced at a far faster rate than can be achieved by a separate EDM process, for instance.
Citizen’s breakthrough opens new design concepts in sectors such as medical, electronic and micro-machining. In a recent trial, a 150 W continuous laser head with an air purge to seal and clear the lens was mounted in the gang tool slide of the latest Citizen Cincom L20-Vlll machine in order to be incorporated into the cutting cycle to produce a complete workpiece from tubular material in a single cycle.
The workpiece, produced from 18 mm diameter tube with a 16 mm bore was turned, faced and had a single flat milled on the outside diameter. The laser beam then proceeded along and around the periphery using C-axis rotation to create a series of rectangular shaped features that were interlocked allowing the component to extend and retract.
A series of cuts were made to form a mesh and the Citizen logo profiled around the circumference.
For further information www.citizenmachinery.co.uk

Trailer manufacturer picks up productivity

At the Bolton factory of trailer manufacturer Indespension, sheet metal cutting productivity has doubled following the replacement of a CO2 laser-powered machine with a fibre laser profiling centre costing nearly £800,000.

The Bystronic ByStar Fiber 6520 has a 4 kW fibre laser and a 6.5 x 2 m capacity bed, making it the largest fibre machine to date delivered by this supplier into the UK market. Only around a dozen machines of this size have been sold worldwide.
Steve Sadler, Indespension’s purchasing director, says: “We cut mainly 43A and pre-galv mild steel, plus some aluminium, from 1 to 12 mm thick. Up to 3 mm, the fibre laser cuts three times faster than CO2. It flies through 1 mm steel, producing 10 holes per second.
The advantage tails off as the thickness increases, but overall the ByStar is twice as fast across all the gauges we process. At a stroke, it has eliminated the bottleneck in our factory that was being caused by the CO2 machine not being able to keep up with our increasing laser cutting workload.”
The fibre laser was purchased in part-exchange for a 6 x 2.5 m capacity CO2 model supplied by Bystronic to Indespension in 2009. Sadler confirmed that a good price was realised for the old machine, despite it having worked up to 20 hours a day, highlighting value retention as an advantage of buying equipment from this Swiss manufacturer.
“Now we can produce the parts in-house in a matter of days, reducing the lead-time for a new trailer from typically six or seven months to less than five, or for a modified trailer from three or four months to less than two,” he says.
For further information www.bystronic.co.uk

Hypertherm puts on a show

With a record number of visitors to the stand, the 19th edition of the recent Schweissen & Schneiden exhibition (Netherlands, October) was a huge success for Hypertherm. The introduction to X-Definition – the new class of plasma, the live cutting demonstrations and the interactive stand were highly appreciated by visitors.

Those attending the show could attend impressive cutting displays. For instance, metal artist Marcel Boonen demonstrated the capabilities of the latest generation of Powermax plasma cutters, the Powermax45 XP, by creating steel paintings and other metal art live on the stand.
Through a live, online connection with Hypertherm’s Cutting Technology Centre at its EMEA headquarters in the Netherlands, the cut quality and speeds of the new XPR300 and XDefinition plasma were ably demonstrated.
Interactive tables that allowed visitors to browse product information, along with the virtual reality game ‘Be amaze-d’, completed the visitor interactive experiences on the stand.
“The technologies we used on our stand clearly portrayed our ‘Shaping Possibility’ company vision”, says Theo Cornielje, regional director for the EMEA region. “They allowed us to explain our technologies in depth, show the systems’ capabilities and guide visitors to the solution that best fits their cutting needs.”
Hypertherm designs and manufactures advanced cutting products for use in a variety of industries such as shipbuilding, manufacturing and automotive repair. Its product lines include plasma, laser and waterjet cutting systems, in addition to CNC motion and height controls, CAM nesting software, robotic software, and consumables.
For further information www.hypertherm.com

Mazak launches laser automation cell

Yamazaki Mazak unveiled its latest laser automation cell at Blechexpo in Stuttgart last week. The OPTIPLEX 3015 DDL 4.0 kW laser processing machine features Direct Diode Laser technology unique to Mazak, complete with a new robotic automation system. Those requiring ultra-fast cutting and high-quality edges are set to benefit most.

According to Mazak, the OPTIPLEX DDL series can cut thin material 20% faster than fibre lasers, and thick materials with high surface quality. The machine has an axis acceleration of 1.8 G and benefits from rapid traverse rates of 120 m/min. Positioning accuracy is maintained to within ±0.05 mm per 500 mm in the X and Y axes, and to within ±0.01 mm per 100mm in the Z axis. The machine also offers repeatability accuracy of ±0.03 mm in the X, Y and Z axes.
Crucially, the OPTIPLEX DDL is a machine capable of a wall plug efficiency of 40-50%, compared with 10% for a CO2 resonator, 15-20% for a disc resonator and 30-40% with a fibre resonator.
At Blechexpo, the machine on display was shown as part of a new automation cell that incorporates a robotic arm mounted to rails adjacent to the cutting table, to load and unload workpieces. The arm can quickly change between sorting tools – which are mounted directly to the robot’s base – depending on application and the size and weight of the workpiece. To deliver fast and accurate machining, the cell’s laser table is equipped with an automatic clamp to secure the workpiece’s position on the table. This is especially useful for cutting thin vinyl-protected material.
For further information www.mazakeu.co.uk