Shot-peening machine with Beckhoff CNC for Denel Aviation South Africa
At Denel Aviation in Johannesburg, South Africa a Beckhoff CNC control for a shot peening machine was successfully put into operation. Denel Aviation manufactures parts for Airbus with this equipment.
The process
When blasting the surface of a work piece it is shot with balls. The treated surface builds a residual compressive stress that relieves the work piece on the surface. As a result, the risk of tension and fatigue cracks is significantly reduced. This technology is mainly used in the aerospace and automotive industries. For example, titanium aero engine parts are treated using this procedure.
The equipment
The system allows continuous blasting with 4 nozzles and blasting of holes and grooves with 2 inner nozzles. For the blast media (balls with different diameters) there are 4 silos including media sorting available. The movement of the nozzle and the work piece are controlled by a CNC.
Our project scope
The automation concept is based on a Beckhoff CNC control with 5 axes on a Beckhoff C6140 industrial PC with Windows XP. The servo drives are connected over SERCOS bus with the CNC.
The integrated TwinCat PLC was used for the process part (media dosing, silo administration, blasting system, media reclaiming and sorting). The external periphery consists of Profibus nodes from Beckhoff.
The visualization with nozzles administration, recipes, statistics, logging, and data storage has been created with VisiWin.net. Our major achievements in this project were , ,
- the electrical design,
- construction of the electrical cabinets,
- software development,
- commissioning and
- training of operating and maintenance staff on site.
Why Beckhoff?
Beckhoff offered the ideal platform for this application. It allows full integration of PLC, CNC and servo drives in a single system. This gives the manufacturer a very good price-performance ratio for this project scope. Likewise, the engineering and commissioning are simple and efficient.
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