Oxyser increased the throughput of its oxy-acetylene steel cutting machinery and automated the process by developing a new twin-head machine controlled by NUM's Axium CNC platform.

The CNC kernel controls 16 motor axes to manage the motion of a gantry with two positioning heads each fitted with mobile oxy-acetylene cutting torches.

The machine introduces automatic programmed control of shape cutting in an application sector used to much simpler machines.

Traditionally, only three CNC-controlled axes are employed and the initial positioning of the oxy-acetylene tool for linear cuts is performed manually.

The gantry runs over very long worktables.  This allows a raw steel plate to be loaded on one side of the gantry while cutting operations are in progress on the other side.
 
NUM provided a solution in the form of its Axium platform, which offered the computational power to control the 16 axes of motion required. NUM was also able to provide all of the ancillary automation components required for the application, including drives, motors, I/O, and HMI panel.
 
The machine’s parallel worktables, one for each tool head, are 26 metres long and eight metres wide.

The gantry supports two cutting tool heads, with one slave tool following the motion of the master tool. The 16 axes control the X-Y movement of the gantry, plus the vertical and rotational movement axes of the two cutting heads.
 
Inside each cutting head, three acetylene torches are positioned in a line.

The middle torch is fixed in position, and the outer torches are provided with an additional two axes of linear and rotational movement to provide the flexibility of positioning required for cutting complex shapes and bevel edges.

All of the axes are powered by servo motors designed by NUM for high performance CNC applications.


http://www.myfen.com.au/Article/NUM-CNC-platform-