A CNC gear hobbing machine has been developed by NUM (NUM Taiwan Ltd) and Taiwan’s Feng Chia University. The machine has an advanced electronic gearbox that completely eliminates the time overheads of changing mechanical gears on traditional machine tools.
The intelligent CNC gear hobbing machine, which utilises five-axis electronic gear synchronisation techniques, is now complete. It is currently being exhibited in the first floor laboratory of Feng Chia University’s College of Engineering.
The open architecture of NUM’s Flexium+ CNC makes it an ideal platform for research and development projects such as this. The human-machine interface (HMI), together with loop programs for gear machining, have been specially created by Professor Xu, who was previously in charge of HMI development at HOTA Industrial Mfg. Co., Ltd. He continues to foster tight collaboration between the university, HOTA, Hiwin Technologies Corp. and NUM.
The new intelligent gear hobbing machine is based on a significant upgrade to a traditional NC gear hobbing machine that featured a mechanism provided by Chang Feng Gear Machinery Co. Ltd. Developed under the Industry 4.0 planning and design concept, it offers powerful expansion capabilities through use of a CNC-PC communication framework. Facilities for monitoring parameters such as spindle speed, temperature and motor current have been added. Transmission of network data, calculation of cloud data, analysis and prediction can be performed via suitably equipped tool wear monitoring systems. This facilitates online compensation and product measurement, to provide optimal cutting parameters and precision.
Founded in 2008, NUM Taiwan Ltd. is a subsidiary of NUM, and is based in Taichung, where many machine factories are located. NUM Taiwan Ltd. is responsible for businesses throughout south-east Asia, Korea and Japan, including CNC project development, after-sales service, education, and training. The company offers a variety of special machining software for gear applications, including an electronic gearbox function (five-axis synchronisation transmission) and an automatic tooth alignment function, which are essential for CNC gear hobbing applications. NUM Taiwan also actively supports Professor Ruihong Xu, responsible for a number of industry-university collaborative research and development projects at the university, in the development of teaching aids for PLC programming, parameter acquisition and machine commissioning.
