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Reduced lead time and production costs
A considerable part of the production costs and lead times when manufacturing aircrafts and other advanced heavy machineries derive from the drilling process.
With Orbital Drilling™ the costs for cutting tools are dramatically reduced since both the lifetime of each cutter is much longer and the need for different types cutters are reduced. The short lifetime of the cutters in a conventional drilling system is caused by the poor cutting capacity in the tool centre. The cutter is overheated and rapidly wears out. With Orbital Drilling™ the cutting edges has only partial and intermittent contact with the surface, this combined with the air cooling avoids overheating, thus prolonging the life time of the cutter.
In conventional drilling, a specific cutter has to be used for each hole size and other special cutters and tools for additional tasks, such as reaming, deburring and countersinking. In Orbital Drilling™ one cutter can be used for all operations, eg; drilling variable hole sizes, adaptive stack drilling, complex shaped holes, cutting returns, countersinking and reaming. This implies that the cutting tool inventory can be substantially reduced.
The total production lead times are often drastically reduced with Orbital Drilling™ since the assembly can be performed in one operation. In an assembly process using conventional drilling you have to go through several time consuming steps including disassembly and reassembling for deburring, separate reaming and cleaning of coolants.
The advantage of not having to use coolant in the drilling process not only makes the coolant cleaning and handling obsolete, it also makes it possible to drill in clean environments.
Another factor to include in the calculations is the recovery of chips. Dry chips are sold for a much higher price than wet sludge.
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