Kollmorgen Provides Advances in Plasma Cutting Machine Capabilities for Emerging Turkish Company
Challenge
A Turkish-based company was looking to improve the cost, cut quality and machine serviceability of their flagship plasma cutting machine. A change from their existing supplier’s design to a higher-quality, more-robust solution was needed to gain market share.
The company partnered with Kollmorgen to address their improvement requirements. The existing machine design incorporated a servo drive with limited connectivity solutions, making it difficult to interface with popular CNC controls. Having only basic tuning capabilities resulted in lower bandwidth and poor cut quality. The goal was to improve cut quality to reduce waste, improve connectivity to industry standard CNCs and to minimize the overall system costs.
Solution
Kollmorgen engineers implemented an AKM/AKD system solution to provide faster indexing and settle times. By implementing advanced tuning, the machine dramatically improved cut quality. Connectivity with the CNC was achieved using the AKD servo drive’s EtherCAT network capability. To address costs and simplify machine assembly, Kollmorgen supplied a single cable option that provides both power and feedback. Removing cables have resulted in important cost savings since each plasma cutting machine cable can exceed 10m. The Kollmorgen single cable option and associated SFD feedback have performed exceptionally well even in the significant EMI/RFI noise environment associated with the machine’s cutting head.
Kollmorgen’s systematic approach to identifying and addressing the customer’s critical needs led to significant improvements in machine cut quality, reduced waste, and required interconnectivity to communicate with the CNC.
Results
Kollmorgen increased the company’s ability to gain market share by dramatically improving its plasma cutting machine performance.
- Bandwidth improvements led to a productivity increase of over 25%
- AKM servo motor single cable option provided a 50% reduction in cabling costs
- Improved cut quality reduced material waste by 11%
- EtherCAT communications improved ease of serviceability
“After the initial run, the customer was excited to see the improved cut quality and believed this would allow them to gain market share.” – Umet Can, Territory Manager, Kollmorgen Turkey
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