The latest product of Turbine Technologies Ltd (Chitek, WI) is the PT-50 Tuboshaft Engine for UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles). It offers a new heavy fuel solution for UAVs requiring a 50 HP class engine. With its minimal volume and a complete flight ready weight of only 30.6 pounds, the engine exhibits excellent power density.
Now the company is in a race to produce refinements that will make the product fit specific real world military and other applications. Ultimately the prototype components must be manufactured for rig testing, data evaluation and subsequent refinement. To make sure this practical problem of manufacturing physical components does not become a bottleneck for engineering throughput, the company recently invested in some advanced simultaneous 5-axis machining equipment and CAM software.
A major objective of this investment was improving prototyping turnarounds by taking some complex components that were being manufactured in the company’s vacuum investment casting foundry and manufacturing them on a new Haas VF2 5-axis vertical machining center. A critical requirement was obtaining CAM software that would provide engineers with exceptionally productive tools for creating toolpaths for very complex geometries which, when manufactured on the CNC equipment, faithfully reproduce the design intent.
The company chose Mastercam X2 software because of the positive experiences the engineer hired to work with 5-axis machining had with the product at his previous job. His familiarity with a formal study by his former employer (an international manufacturer) on the strengths and weaknesses of many CAD brands gave him additional confidence in the choice of Mastercam for this application. An additional plus was the close proximity Chippewa Valley Technical College (less than 30 miles) that provides training on CNC machines and CAM software identical to what is used at Turbine Technologies.
Mike Kutrieb, Turbine Technologies’ Vice President, said, “Not everything can be machined. Some of these super alloys are difficult to machine let alone some of the geometries we create and passages we can’t get a cutter into. There are high temperature components where we have no other method but the casting process. But a lot of the work has been pulled back into the machine shop because of our new capabilities.
To create prototype parts for a turbine engine, the engineer typically starts out using Ansus software to generate some geometry along with doing flow analyses. The part typically moves to SolidWorks for modeling and then to Mastercam where the part opens seamlessly as a parasolid or IGES extension.
The real trick to moving a prototype part along expeditiously is being able to select an optimal toolpath for creating complex modern-art-like geometries found in axial blades, centrifugal impellers, diffusers, and the like. As an example, Kutreib cited a diffuser that was recently programmed for 5-axis machining. On average, if things go smoothly, it might take 2½ weeks to move this part from the design through the investment casting process to get a part for testing. With Mastercam and 5-axis CNC machining, this part and others like it are being turned around in several days. This, in turn, is helping Turbine Technologies keep pace with its aggressive product development and testing schedules.
Test results indicate that the Turboshaft engine design could have a life expectancy as much as ten times greater than gas piston engines. Given the right application and the right numbers, this could make the product very cost competitive. So Turbine Technologies is betting on this promising possibility. It has augmented its initial 9000 sq. ft. by acquiring an additional 32,000 sq. ft. of space for future expansion. If that’s not enough, the company also owns a 7-acre site. But right now the focus is on expeditious engineering. |