High performance machining centre at Siemens

Heller deliver high performance MCi 25 horizontal machining centre for turbine blade production at Siemens power generation plant in Newcastle

Price, performance, delivery is the mantra of the manufacturing environment and is accepted as the key to profitable production.

It takes on a whole new meaning when delivery is critical and lateness punished with severe financial penalties.

To the Siemens Power Generation plant in Newcastle upon Tyne, this is everyday business.

Manufacturing turbine blades for the power generation industry delivery must be on time every time if liquidated damages are to be avoided.

It has recently installed a Heller MCi 25 horizontal machining centre alongside two existing Heller MCi 16 machining centres to increase its production capacity and to continue to assure its ability to deliver.

Heller installed the machine only four months after receipt of order.

Power generation is undoubtedly a high risk industry, and one in which the customer has to be absolutely sure of the manufacturer - there is simply no room for a mistake of any kind yet fast turn-round of orders is essential.

In this difficult environment, Siemens has become the supplier of choice to its customers because they can be secure in its capability and versatility and has earned a second-to-none pedigree in service.

It has achieved its enviable position in the industry by hard work and intelligent, imaginative management.

A policy of continuous improvement is inherent throughout the company.

CMM inspection gives live feed-back to the machine to ensure that every blade is within its tolerance band, which can be less than 20 microns, exceptionally tight on a component as large as a turbine blade.

Siemens offers a wide range of turbine blades, and has begun offering reverse engineered blades so can manufacture any type of turbine blade a customer requires.

It is unusual in that it can manufacture the blades from solid, rather than working with a forging supplier to produce a form, enabling it to reduce lead times substantially, often as much as six months.

Employing modern machining strategies has enabled the company to reduce even further the lead time on machining components.

In addition to starting with solid metal instead of a forging, it has reduced the machining operations and combined them into one set up on the Hellers.

Production Engineer in charge of the Heller cell Chris Taylor said "It was to help us achieve this that we purchased the additional Heller.

We are winning more and more work, so needed additional capacity, but we also wanted to further reduce cycle times.

For us, where our typical throughput can be several thousand pa, this meant reducing set up.

The geometric accuracy of the machine is excellent and this gave us the confidence to combine operations and reduce set up.

"Most important to us was working with a machine tool supplier we could trust.

We have had a relationship with Heller for more than twenty years, and our experience has been very good.

We have been consistently impressed with the MC16s we have: throughput and machine up-time have been more than satisfactory and we know we can rely on Heller's service.

The other advantage of purchasing another Heller was that the operators are familiar with the control, the software, and the fixturing so training would be minimal.

The MCi 25 is a versatile machine with the advantage that we can put anything on it, so gives us the versatility to handle whatever orders we receive.

It was installed and cutting within four months of our placing the order".

The order was prompted by Siemens winning another substantial order, and an additional machine was needed to give sufficient capacity to machine the blade root, which is machined to finished size from solid in one set up.

The MCi 25 was selected because of its versatility and the size of its working envelope.

By employing ingenious machining techniques - for instance the root is machined using plunge milling - torque is less important.

The blades can vary in size and range in length from 100 to 790mm.

To minimise change over time, the Heller part programmers have written parametric programs.

These enable the machine operators to program the machine by entering the particular values of the variable dimensions from drawings without further reference to the Programming Department.

A reduced cycle time and an assurance of repeatability between the pallets is achieved by the fixture-pallet interface.

This has a direct hydraulic feed through the centre of table so hydraulic clamping is easier, faster, more accurate and ergonomically better for operators.

Essential to the maintenance of tolerance and repeatability is the positional accuracy of the pallets, "excellent on the Hellers".

Since being installed, Siemens has achieved 98% uptime from the machine and on the quality performance the rating on features can be less that two defects per million.

To ensure the machines continue to perform at this outstanding level, Siemens has invested in a Heller preventative maintenance contract.

Chris Taylor said "It is vital that we consistently achieve excellent quality and do not fail to meet a delivery date.

The MCi is the right machine to enable us to accomplish these goals and Heller is the ideal partner for us".

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