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Although engine lathes are versatile and very useful, because of the time required for changing and setting tools and for making measurements on the work piece, thy are not suitable for quantity production. Often the actual chip-production tine is less than 30% of the total cycle time. In addition, a skilled machinist is required for all the operations, and such persons are costly and often in short supply. However, much of the operator’s time is consumed by simple, repetitious adjustments and in watching chips being made. Consequently, to reduce or eliminate the amount of skilled labor that is required, turret lathes, screw machines, and other types of semiautomatic and automatic lathes have been highly developed and are widely used in manufacturing.
2、 Numerical Control
One of the most fundamental concepts in the area of advanced manufacturing technologies is numerical control (NC). Prior to the advent of NC, all machine tools ere manually operated and controlled. Among the many limitations associated with manual control machine tools, perhaps none is more prominent than the limitation of operator skills. With manual control, the quality of the product is directly related to and limited to the skills of the operator. Numerical control represents the first major step away from human control of machine tools.
Numerical control means the control of machine tools and other manufacturing systems through the use of prerecorded, written symbolic instructions. Rather than operating a machine tool, an NC technician writes a program that issues operational instructions to the machine tool. For a machine tool to be numerically controlled, it must be interfaced with a device for accepting and decoding the programmed instructions, known as a reader.
Numerical control was developed to overcome the limitation of human operators, and it has done so. Numerical control machines are more accurate than manually operated machines, they can produce parts more uniformly, they are faster, and the long-run tooling costs are lower. The development of NC led to the development of several other innovations in manufacturing technology:
Electrical discharge machining,Laser cutting,Electron beam welding.
Numerical control has also made machine tools more versatile than their manually operated predecessors. An NC machine tool can automatically produce a wide of parts, each involving an assortment of widely varied and complex machining processes. Numerical control has allowed manufacturers to undertake the production of products that would not have been feasible from an economic perspective using manually controlled machine tolls and processes.
Like so many advanced technologies, NC was born in the laboratories of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The concept of NC was developed in the early 1950s with funding provided by the U.S. Air Force. In its earliest stages, NC machines were able to made straight cuts efficiently and effectively.
However, curved paths were a problem because the machine tool had to be programmed to undertake a series of horizontal and vertical steps to produce a curve. The shorter the straight lines making up the steps, the smoother is the curve, Each line segment in the steps had to be calculated.
This problem led to the development in 1959 of the Automatically Programmed Tools (APT) language. This is a special programming language for NC that uses statements similar to English language to define the part geometry, describe the cutting tool configuration, and specify the necessary motions. The development of the APT language was a major step forward in the fur ther development from those used today. The machines had hardwired logic circuits. The instructional programs were written on punched paper, which was later to be replaced by magnetic plastic tape. A tape reader was used to interpret the instructions written on the tape for the machine. Together, all of this represented a giant step forward in the control of machine tools. However, there were a number of problems with NC at this point in its development.