Milling Machine

Automotive parts subject to high loads, such as drive shafts, gear wheels, and cardan joints, are formed using special tools. Besides having to meet increasingly demanding quality requirements, component manufacturers have to pay particular attention to the cost of the manufacturing process as a whole.

Automotive parts, for instance, and the cold-working tools used to shape them, are expected to last for increasingly longer. For this reason, they are made out of extremely hard, high-strength materials, but this also means that they are more difficult to machine. It is a major challenge for the European tooling and mould-making industry, because the parts have to be manufactured to a high standard of quality, without driving up costs of the Fraunhofer Institute for Production Technology, in Aaachen.

In Hard Precision, we took a broad view of the whole process chain. Our partners told us which materials they intended to work with in future. These comprised mainly conventional and powder-metallurgical cold-work and high-speed steels. The modern trend in manufacturing is to use a single forming process to produce increasingly complex shapes, for instance, highly loaded steering system components. As a consequence, toolmakers are also having to deal with highly complex shapes. This, in turn, increases the complexity of the necessary machining tools and the design of the individual milling paths.

The solution found by the researchers was to adapt the machine to the new requirements by developing an optimized prototype with all-hydrostatic bearings. The improvements they implemented included the integration of lightweight structures and optimizing the coordination between the machine and the control system.