GE90
Engine
A.
S. Thomas, Inc. is pleased to announce that General Electric’s Aircraft
Engine Group is utilizing the NUFORM System and consulting services from A.
S. Thomas, Inc. to manufacture various compressor components for the GE90
Engine.
Allied Signal Ireland
Partnering
with Boston Digital Corporation, A. S. Thomas, Inc. has been selected to
provide a turn-key compressor blade manufacturing cell to Allied Signal's
Blade Manufacturing Center of Excellence in Waterford, Ireland. NUFORM System software will be utilized
to generate tool paths to manufacture compressor rotor blades from forgings
to finish in two operations. Thomas
Mills and other manufacturing technologies will be utilized in the
manufacturing process.
General Electric - Toshiba
General
Electric Power Generation and Toshiba have formed a manufacturing
subsidiary, GTTC, which will manufacture turbine blades in the world's
largest steam turbine blade manufacturing facility in Monterey,
Mexico. The NUFORM System has been
selected as the sole CAM system for this new venture. Extensive use will be made of NUFORM
Family of Parts and knowledge base systems, NUFORM Level-II, NUFORM
Level-I, as well as custom software systems to provide advance manufacturing
capabilities.
Y2K Update
In testing for Year 2000 compliance, a bug was
found. All customers will be
receiving software updates correcting the problem.
Software Enhancements
Shadow Surfaces - a
utility has been created which will calculate the "shadow" that a
surface casts on a plane. The shadow
surface can be thought of as the contour which must be cut to allow a
surface to pass through without rotation.
Automatic Roughing Surfaces -
once a shadow surface is generated, automatic roughing surfaces can be
created. The roughing surfaces are
designed to facilitate "slab" cutting a raw stock prior to
semi-finish and finish operations.
The roughing surface may be globally convex, i.e. span the concave
faces, or in the case of a blade, have two faces forming a notch over the
concave region.
Windows-NT, Windows-95,
Windows-98 - alpha testing has commenced
on the port of NUFORM Level-II, Family of Parts, Interactive NUFORM, and
the myriad of software components of the NUFORM System on Windows-NT,
Windows-95, and Windows-98. The
SOL3D graphics display program and Interactive NUFORM will have multiple display
modes including wire frame and dynamic solid modeling.
Horizon Curves - A
new type of curve is under development for NUFORM Level-II V7, the horizon
curve. The horizon curve is the
locus of points on the target surface which is the extent of possible
contact of a given cutting tool and orientation.
