sinumerik-one-5axis-milling-toyota-australia-cncdesign-ptyltd

Client: Toyota Design Australia
Industry: Automotive
Type: Machine tool user
Project: CNC retrofit for Rambaudi H60L 5-axis gantry milling machine

The Customer

Since its founding in 1963, Toyota Australia has thrived for excellence and cemented its position as the leading automotive company in Australia.

Continuous innovation for developing vehicles which are safe, reliable and with minimum impact on the environment are key points in the global success of this car maker.

Toyota Design Australia, the research & development centre from Melbourne, played a crucial role in keeping the company always at the edge of technological advances in the competitive automotive field.

Before getting on the roads and catching everyone's eyes, the shapes of the sleek cars go through a long iterative design process, with full-size models in soft materials being refined before the steel starts to be shaped.

Client: Toyota Design Australia
Industry: Automotive
Type: Machine tool user
Project: CNC retrofit for Rambaudi H60L 5-axis gantry milling machine

The Customer

Since its founding in 1963, Toyota Australia has thrived for excellence and cemented its position as the leading automotive company in Australia.

Continuous innovation for developing vehicles which are safe, reliable and with minimum impact on the environment are key points in the global success of this car maker.

Toyota Design Australia, the research & development centre from Melbourne, played a crucial role in keeping the company always at the edge of technological advances in the competitive automotive field.

Before getting on the roads and catching everyone's eyes, the shapes of the sleek cars go through a long iterative design process, with full-size models in soft materials being refined before the steel starts to be shaped.

The Challenge

In this modelling process of a new car, complex machines are involved. One of these machines, located at Toyota Design Australia, is a Rambaudi H60L 5-axis gantry milling machine explicitly designed for this type of work.

After many years of doing great work, the control system of this machine became outdated and aligned with their constant goal to stay at the top of technology; Toyota Design Australia decided to upgrade this machine.

As a result, CNC Design was contracted to retrofit the CNC control system to the latest SINUMERIK ONE CNC from Siemens, the top CNC platform on the market for high-end machine tools.

The new SINUMERIK ONE CNC is complemented with SINAMICS S120 drive system and the very performant SIMOTICS 1FT7 servomotors.

The Retrofit

When redesigning the controls for the machine, CNC Design worked closely with the team from Toyota Design Australia in adapting the new CNC to better suit the specific of their work by:

Optimizing the size and tuning the dynamic of the new servomotors.
Making great use of the new functions for 5-axis high-speed milling available for SINUMERIK ONE, like TOP SURFACE and TOP SPEED PLUS.
Optimizing the safe functions for the machine for a safer environment during part setup work using SINUMERIK Safety Integrated functions.
Adapting the new SINUMERIK OPERATE Human Machine Interface and devices for this specific machine

The Result

The results were outstanding, as also confirmed by the words of Mr. Dennis Damsma, Toyota Design Australia Studio Engineering & Milling Manager:

At Toyota Design Australia, speed and reliability is highly important when we use our milling machines. The retrofit activity completed by CNC Design has significantly improved the Rambaudi H60L 5-axis CNC machine performance in terms of speed and accuracy. Integrating the latest Siemens SINUMERIK ONE platform and drives will provide Toyota Design Australia with improved capability in order to create ever-better design prototypes, including full scale models.

All of us at CNC Design, we are proud to have our contribution in keeping Toyota Design Australia at the top of machine tools technology and helping Toyota Design Australia in shaping the future of the new vehicles which will move us around in the decades to come.