CARBOMILL in Switzerland is a specialist in the machining of composite materials and supplies leading manufacturers in the aerospace, defence and automotive industries. The company has moved its design, engineering and manufacturing processes to the 3DEXPERIENCE platform on the cloud to deliver parts of the highest quality. It uses the Digital Equipment Continuity industry solution to visualize parts, modify geometries, and plan, detail, test and optimize its machining processes.
High precision milling all the way to Mars
When the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Rosalind Franklin rover lands on Mars, it will begin an unprecedented search for past and present signs of life on the Red Planet. Roaming the Martian terrain, the rover will drill into the planet’s surface looking for evidence of organic matter buried deep underground. All of the scientific instruments and computers needed for this endeavor are housed within the rover’s bathtub-shaped chassis. Made from carbon fiber with an inner honeycomb structure, the chassis is a culmination of engineering expertise from across Europe, including a team of mechanical machining specialists from CARBOMILL, based in Switzerland.
CARBOMILL’s role was to precisely mill hundreds of contours in the chassis’ laminated mold and then, at a later stage, mechanically machine it once the inserts and brackets were bonded in place.
“We received the carbon bonded structure from the customer along with the CAD model,” said Roland Hoffmann, key account manager and quality manager at CARBOMILL. “It was already worth over a million euros so there was a great deal of pressure to get our job right. There were more than 2,000 different operations for us to do on it.”
The CARBOMILL team couldn’t afford to make a single mistake. One hole milled even a fraction of a millimeter out of place could have jeopardized the entire chassis. That’s why the decision was made to simulate every process virtually first – a task carried out using the 3DEXPERIENCE platform on the cloud. CARBOMILL simulated all the numeric code (NC) before running it on the machine. This was particularly important for positioning the carbon fiber component on the table in the correct orientation and defining the optimal set up. Because of the machine kinematics, there are two possibilities to get to the same point and it was only through simulation that the team could determine the best approach and ensure high accuracy.
“We had to define the dimensions and make sure the milling and drilling job was going to be completely error free,” said Markus Speckert, IT business analyst at CARBOMILL. “All of this was achieved using the 3DEXPERIENCE platform on the cloud. From the CAD model, we programmed and simulated the entire NC for the machine so we could virtually see and understand exactly what it needed to do.”
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