Industrial Machinery Digest Quarterly - IMD Quarter 1, 2021

Page 12

Process

How the Fox Outsmarted the Hare: Using Intelligence to Outperform Brute Force ANCA’s New EDG with ANCA Motion SparX Erosion Generator Decreases Cycle Time for PCD Tools by 50% By: Tom Nathan, ANCA PCD Erosion Product Manager

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hen ANCA decided to create the ANCA EDG (Electro Discharge Grinding) machine in 2011, the mission was clear. The company wanted to create a high-performance Rotary Electro Discharge Machining (EDM) platform that was not only able to produce best-in-class tool geometries, but also have market leading cycle times. It was the brainchild of Pat Boland, ANCA Founder and Managing Director, who realized that to outperform the incumbents, brains was needed over brawn. “The erosion process is simple in its complexity. The basis of the process uses positive and negative electrodes with electrolyte to create sparks along a

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material. ANCA has a 45-year history in making the world’s best carbide and HSS tools and we wanted to use that skill set in PCD tooling,” said Pat. The main drivers behind the ANCA EDG machines were that it needed to be simple enough for all types of brazed shearfluted tools, but complex enough to enable the creation of the infinite variety of helical solid-tipped, veined and chevron tools. Pat adds: “We realized early on that with the complexity of tool geometries we wanted to allow our customers to create, the 5-axis interpolation while maintaining the precise erosion gap distance was going to be a challenge.”


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