MACHINED COMPONENTS | Engineering Capacity A new five-axis machining centre, with 30 pallet storage and retrieval serviced by an industrial robot has reduced production times for turbo-fan parts from a week to a day. A few years ago, T&R Precision Engineering in Foulridge, East Lancashire, started manufacturing parts from Inconel 625 castings for the hot air side of the GE-Safran LEAP-1A turbofan that powers the Airbus A320neo family of single-aisle jets. The problem was that the work involved a labour-intensive sequence of three or four operations on separate machines. Not only was there a significant risk of introducing human error, but it also necessitated the production of a batch of eight components to start each day but each batch would take one week to complete. The solution was an Okuma MU5000V 5-axis vertical machining centre (VMC) equipped with a Dutch-made Cellro 30-station pallet storage and retrieval system served by a 6-axis industrial robot. Managing Director Tim Maddison commented, "The improvement in production performance has been enormous across the four different LEAP1A castings that we machine. All parts are now produced in one hit in a one-hour cycle, which means that eight components are now ready the same day rather than after a week. "The substantial saving in lead-time is accompanied by vastly less workpiece handling 14
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Single-hit savings at T&R
and work-in-progress on the shop floor, while at the same time fewer free-issue Inconel castings need to be supplied by our US customer at any given time, saving them money as well." A further benefit is a 50% reduction in total processing time compared with when the parts were produced in three or four separate operations. An additional saving that Mr Maddison describes as "massive" comes from inspecting every completed part in the VMC in a 10-minute routine at the end of the cutting cycle. So instead of 100% inspection on a coordinate measuring machine, only one part per day now needs to be checked off-line. The production cell was installed in November 2019, shortly before the start of the pandemic. The aircraft build rate promptly collapsed from 63 per month to zero, but Mr Maddison
advised that by the start of 2022 it had recovered to 50 per month, will return to pre-Covid levels by the end of the year and is predicted to rise by a further 20% during the course of 2023. The contract machinist could not have coped with these increased volumes without investment in the Okuma/Cellro plant, but is now in a position to take full advantage. The layout of the equipment is such that, if future volumes dictate, there is space for a second Okuma MU5000V to be installed adjacent to the first and to be served with pallets of pre-fixtured components from the same Cellro robotic store. It was this potential that steered the manufacturer away from sourcing a machining centre with its own integrated pallet storage and retrieval system. A number of notable technical advances have been incorporated MAY 2022
