How To Create The Perfect Digital Twin

Digitalisation of tool- selection and assembly creation increases machining efficiency.

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As well as achieving in machining efficiencies through advanced tooling technologies and strategies, there are many gains to be had earlier in the process, at the design and planning stage. Here, the digitalisation of previously manual processes such as tooling item selection and tool assembly creation can help to significantly increase efficiency and machining security. Cutting tool data can in fact be gathered more accurately and used to create precise digital twin representations – a functionality that has become fundamental in the modern workflow to prevent errors at the machining stage. Today, such processes can be fully integrated with the user’s CAM software, and can be completed with a few simple clicks as part of an easy to use menu driven process.

In machining applications, it is not individual tool items such as tool holders, cutters and inserts that are used on machines, but tool assemblies. In many instances this creates a somewhat laborious task for the CAM programmer, where there exist several opportunities for error, not least failing to select the optimum tool items in the first instance. Furthermore, many typical tool assemblies can take up to 1 hour to create. With some components demanding the use of 25 or more different tool assemblies, this is an enormous overhead to the business in terms of both time and cost.