Totally Integrated Part Manufacturing Workflow with CAD/CAM/OMP/CMM

07/28/2021

NX Metrology is coming soon. We are integrating the entire workflow for complete automation of the part manufacturing, including On Machine Probing and CMM.

Trends & Facts, experience, forecast and motivation

It is very hard to guess what is coming after COVID-19 in the PLM domain other than the previous years forecast regarding cloud deployment, augmented reality and artificial intelligence.

It’s specifically difficult to predict future in the part manufacturing area, due to its traditional, conservative way of conduction. We can be sure that the market will experience some rollercoaster type of ups and downs and might not achieve a stable status in the upcoming years.

With the remote working experience, we see that communication between different engineering and production teams is becoming more and more critical: using and collaborating on consistent, always up-to-date data in all the part manufacturing processes become more important than ever. „Over the wall” type of approach puts companies in difficult situation, so process integration is key and most critical aspect of efficiency and cost.

Communication between Enginneering Teams

The vision: Integration for automation enablement

Design & CAM is a good example of deep integration for many years. Now we can start calculating decades! CAD models with PDM, PLM systems with CAM can be totally integrated and this integration is not a big challenge today, however, communicating part and assembly level requirements in a way of using total automation is still a long way to go. Engineering drawings still used for most of the manufacturing & quality tasks, interpretation is more and more based on standards, but a large influence is still from experience, and in-house type of interpretations.

How about integrating a new automation engine, probing and inspection into the Part Manufacturing loop within the same, CAM application of NX?

Model preparation and automation engine: NX Model Based Definition

Our aim is to develop an architecture, where a manufacturing and inspection program is generated with a „Single click” based on rules. The rules can be used with or without PMI also, using attributes, colors and any user specified characteristic of the part.

Common authoring and automation platform for CAD/CAM/CMM
MBD (Model Based Definition) Downstream data consumption for automatization of CMM path generation

What will that look like? We give you a preview:

NX MBD will be enabled for CMM Inspection Programming with the NX winter version 2021.

NX On Machine Probing

NX OMP is becoming a user friendly option to program basic measurement cycles on machine tool with an adaptive, cycle parameter based user interface.

Measure, evaluate and compensate unavoidable process variations
Integration of control cycles with the support of resources, processes and capabilities established in NX CAM
Easy and smart to use, visualizable, flexible and adaptable to individual and tailorable requirements and extensions
Representation, validation and simulation of the tool paths and the introduced logic within the proven possibilities

NX CMM

Our aim is to completely integrate the CMM workflow into the CAM architecture. CMM inspection is now a CAM operation, what generates the inspection feature, path and tolerance within one dialog.

The Inspection operation supports four workflows:

Geometry selection
A feature operation is created for the selected geometry. To avoid confusion with geometry belonging to the specified Geometry Group parent (e.g. a machining feature), the feature operation for selected geometry is assigned WORKPIECE as its Geometry Group.

Select PMI
Picking PMI automatically creates an inspection path. The order of tolerances listed is the order in which the individual PMI elements are selected.

Use machining feature
Picking a machining feature group lists the machining features as shown in the Machining Feature Navigator. The geometry available to inspect is listed according to their role.

Select traditional Geometry Group
Picking a traditional geometry group lists the available cut area, floor, and wall geometry as defined in the geometry group. The geometry available to inspect is listed according to their role.