Indexable Drilling Feature

Third Wave Systems announced its enhanced indexable drilling capability. The indexable drilling feature in Third Wave Systems finite element analysis software, AdvantEdge, will allow customers to better understand their processes, providing not only forces and chip shape results, but also stresses and temperatures throughout the cutting process.

Throughout the last decade, the cost of raw materials for tungsten carbide has increase by more than six times, causing the cost of solid carbide tooling to significantly increase. Within the cost sensitive and increasingly competitive manufacturing industry, the rise in cost has caused a dramatic shift in the marketplace from solid carbide tooling to indexable and removable tip tooling.

In response to the changes, Third Wave Systems has redesigned the AdvantEdge indexable drilling capability, which will be available later in 2014. The improvements enable users to import solid geometries from CAD software that include both cutting inserts and cutter bodies. Using the cutting parameters entered into the software, an in-cut workpiece is generated which allows the user to simulate the cutting process.

"Our customer-based market focus and commitment was why we identified and invested in the overhaul of our indexable drilling capability," Kerry Marusich, Third Wave Systems President, said. "The ability to understand current capabilities and test new ideas in a virtual environment will result in significant competitive advantages for our customers in the indexable drilling marketplace."

This virtual simulation environment reduces, and sometimes even eliminates, the need for halting production during the prototyping process. The validated, material-specific modeling and physics-based machining calculations within AdvantEdge allow the knowledge-based design and comparison of new tooling.

The Third Wave Systems indexable drilling capability will also include a significant improvement to the automation of meshing parameters to calculate the parameters based directly on the in-cut chip thickness and incorporating interest overlap. This improvement further automates the setup process for users, which allows for less setup time and more time spent analyzing results.