This gives manufacturers the option of authorized remote assistance provided by the respective GF Division plants. Behind this is a remote analysis system for the machine tool industry. The company recently launched its “rConnect” system, a central communications platform for milling, EDM and laser texturing. This technology makes it possible to machine electrically conductive materials of any hardness and with the highest surface qualities. Take electrical discharge machining, for example. “Our ambition is to play a pioneering role in the development of innovative products and solutions,” says CEO Benz. The company operates the facility in a three-shift rotation two of the shifts run automatically, without an operator.įor some time now, GF Machining Solutions has focused on more than pure and simple machine production. A linear robot connects a milling machine with an EDM machine in the cell, controlled by shared CellManager software. The company recently commissioned a fully automatic and autonomous linear cell assembly. This family-run business, based in the southwest of Germany, sells injection-molded plastic products and injection molding tools. Fitted with pallet magazines, tool changers and zero-point clamping systems, the centers outsource non-productive processes, such as set-up and clamping procedures or tool adjusting, from main time to parallel units. At BMW’s tooling and moldmaking center, for instance, two GFMS milling processing centers have been in continuous operation since the beginning of 2012. This approach has earned the Swiss company a place in the production facilities of nearly every big name in the manufacturing industry. For us, the focus is on providing solutions.” “We see ourselves as more than a supplier of machines. “We don’t just have ‘solutions’ as part of our name we also live these solutions on a day-to-day basis,” says CEO Heiko Benz. It also supplies everything else required to operate the machinery, such as spare and wear parts, consumables such as wires, electrodes, filters, and graphite. The Swiss company develops and manufactures the necessary electric discharge machines, high-speed and high-performance milling machines, and 3D laser surface texturing machines. The company describes itself as a global leading provider of machines to the tool- and moldmaking industry, as well as to precision parts manufacturers. According to the latest figures, the division’s approximately 3,000 employees generated annual sales of around 900 million euros at 50 sites worldwide. GF Machining Solutions is one of three divisions of the Swiss industrial group Georg Fischer AG. Components are automatically allocated to the milling processing centers without restricting access for the operator-an ideal connection to the automatic loading system at the blisk production center in Munich. “The machines have been adapted to the specific demands of blisk production at MTU,” explains Michel Eder, GF Machining Solutions’ key account manager for MTU. Although portfolio isn’t really the right term. It is these characteristics that make the Mikron HPM 800U the most technically advanced machine in GFMS’s portfolio. Normally you need a specially adapted machine for each separate application,” Sürth points out. “Machines of this type are capable of producing all blisks for the GTF programs on a single unit. The Mikron HPM 800U milling machines manufactured by GF Machining Solutions represent a kind of life insurance for the ramp-up. And blisk production is being massively ramped up: until recently, MTU was producing around 600 of these components each year by the end of 2016, production capability is set to increase to 3,500. The blisks are used above all in Pratt & Whitney’s PurePower® PW1000G family of engines with Geared Turbofan™ (GTF) technology. They have to do so at high speed and with a high degree of reliability. His milling machines are not only required to produce exactly the same results every time. With good reason-after all, he’s dealing with tolerances to within an accuracy of a few hundredths of a millimeter. “Only machines that are exactly the same in construction will also produce exactly the same results.” The director of blisk production for MTU Aero Engines in Munich is fastidious.
“We rely on absolutely accurate reproducibility,” explains Walter Sürth. Every installed pipe, every screw, every circuit board, every small engine-right down to the software. In the end they must all be exactly the same: absolutely identical high-speed milling machines.
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