A. S. Thomas, Inc.

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 havemultiple 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.