Report from EMO 2009 Bruce Rowley

This year I visited EMO for two days and while the number of machines and companies on display were down there were still lots of interesting things to see and new products and technologies.

Australian Companies at EMO

Only two Australian companies had stands at EMO this year, ANCA and Suttons Tools, although AMTIL had the usual Country industry stand.

ANCA had one machine on the stand. Had a talk to Pat Boland and looks like business is picking up. Suttons had their tooling on display and seemed to be doing well. Dropped in to see Shane Infanti at AMTIL.

SIEMENS AT EMO

Some very big new product releases were evident this year on the Siemens Stand. The biggest news was the launch of the SINUMERIK 828D mid range CNC system. Every hour six beautiful models paraded onto the catwalk wearing 828D operator panels as clothing accessories. Each model highlighted a key feature of the 828D. These included Flexibility, Usability, Performance, Communications and International support.  A presenter highlighted the features of the 828D and invited the crowd to meet the girls and see the control. Really this was the most exciting presentation at EMO and every time it drew a huge audience. Must say the time spent at the Siemens stand was very enjoyable!

SINUMERIK 828D is suitable for Milling machines up to 6 axes and turning machines up to 8 axes. It was also shown on 13 machines at EMO from very high volume MT OEM's in Taiwan, Korea, USA, India, UK and Germany. Siemens had a second separate stand with five machines running 828D machining parts. every machine with SINUMERIK 828D was working perfectly and you really could see the huge effort that has gone into 828D to make this a complete system from the start with everything well tested and working well. Some key points for 828D are the jobshop programming, interactive element simulation, 80 bit measuring resolution - wow what a winner for nano machining and great surface finish!. The new Operate HMI (also on 840Dsl) really looks nice and easy to use and for high speed milling the MDynamics package really dramatically improves surface finish and makes for faster cutting times. I think we will see 828D storm the market for 3-5 axis milling machines and 2-6 axis lathes.

The flagship 840Dsl was also very much in the limelight. with the same Operate HMI, jobshop programming and MDynamics capabilities it is very compatable with the 828D. Now the 840Dsl has advanced features for all types of machining technologies such as Milling, turning, Laser cutting, Grinding and many others. Enery saving was a hot topic with SINUMERIK/SINAMICS showing how it compensates for the whole machine electrical system, not just the drives,  to give a power factor of 1.0. 840Dsl  was also showing off its new industry standard robot interface talking happily to a Motoman robot.

Siemens Aerospace Market support team was strongly represented including Dirk Rabeneck (Aerospace CoC Manager) and Tim Goodhead (Corporate Account Manager UK). Lots of solutions for Aerospace were shown for the first time. SINUMERIK 840Dsl is really the dominant controller for this industry with Volumetric Compensation System now recommended for all JSF suppliers to achieve the high accuracies required.  MDynamics is available in 3 and 5 axis versions for very high speed machining, Siemens CAD system NX offers a free 5 axis post processor module for every machine purchasaed with SINUMERIK 840D and NX has also released a module for integrating CMM funtionality with 840Dsl so no need for third party CMM software solutions.

Mori Seiki and DMG at EMO

DMG and Mori Seiki had separate but adjoining stands and these were the biggest at EMO. This is the first EMO since the companies started to co-operate early this year. Big news on the Mori Seiki stand was that they had to machines with signs saying "Available with Siemens SINUMERIK in 2010" !!!!

Lots more on display and we will feature some of these in coming weeks.

Regards

Bruce Rowley