Siemens Aerospace & Defense Industry

“[We created] a digital twin of the parts we needed to produce … and developed and verified machining strategies well in advance of the production process. This allowed us to provide valuable advice to our customers in the early stages of product creation so they can modify the designs for improved manufacturability.”

Patrick Ziswiler, Managing Director | C-Mill Technologies

Back in 1997, C-Mill leveraged high-speed cutting (HSC) – a new mechanical technology that was sparsely used in production environments. As they wanted to offer customers a combination of top precision and shorter turnaround time, they began looking into solutions that helped meet demanding quality requirements, tight deadliness, and machine difficult materials – including titanium, Inconel, to tantalum. However, everything required manual work and management. “[Our] process involved exporting 2D drawings from 3D CAD models, manually augmenting all dimensions with various tolerances, and programming CMM online until completed,” explains Ziswiler.

As the team was already leveraging NX CAM, they looked into its CMM inspection capabilities – enabling them to streamline the CMM inspection program development and measurements analysis process. The CMM features allowed the team to run inspection tasks whenever required. “An inspection can be performed the moment a part leaves the milling center so the machine is not kept idle.” The solution led the team to much more efficient measuring processes and also cut measuring equipment downtime by 80 percent.

“Our operators who are running the distribution center in Rwanda can’t be thinking about drone technology or weather concerns. They have to be focused on who needs what medical supply and get it there on time, right away. That’s all they need to be thinking about.”

Keenan Wyrobeck, Co-Founder / Head of Engineering | Zipline International Inc

It’s estimated that more than 2 billion people lack adequate access to essential medical products. The team at Zipline was determined to get medical supplies to the countries that didn’t have easy access to it. “We looked at the problems people were trying to solve, the problem of logistics with traveling over dirt roads and rainy seasons…,” explains Wyrobeck. After considering his options, he came to the conclusion that he could “fly over those roads, get these products there and have a massive healthcare impact.”

By leveraging NX, Zipline could load the entire aircraft drone into the CAD model and check the fit of individual parts against the rest of the plane. The software solution allowed the team to “create a shell for our entire vehicle and work from the inside out … in order to develop [the drone] rapidly.”

“The processes developed by OPT’ALM paved the way for new manufacturing and repair methods … [it] represents a game-changer for industrialists.”

Alain Toufine, CEO | OPT’ALM

“Other solutions adapt or derive the traditional 5-axis CAM machining approach to 3D printing,” explains Jean Daniel Klockbring (Business Partner for OPT’ALM). OPT’ALM manufactures custom aerospace parts using a mix process, additive manufacturing, and traditional production methods. As production can get costly due to difficult-to-produce metal parts, they needed an efficient process that was faster, cost-efficient, and environmentally friendly. They turned to Siemens NX because of it’s multi-axis deposition module to stimulate and control their MODULO 400 BeAM machine.

The company saw significant gains – from reduced cycle times to 60 percent material savings. What typically took five sub-assemblies to complete now took them a single operation to produce parts. “We went for reliability, performance and customization ability,” said Alain Toufine, CEO at OPT’ALM. The solution “offered a real ‘additive’ strategy with a high-performance, multi-axis module that immediately won us over.”