Complete Milling of Impellers: Specialised Expertise – Highest Quality

Customers of Polygona AG, based in Jona, Switzerland, testify to the excellent technical level of their impellers, even though the company began production only two years ago.

Closed impellers are becoming increasingly important. Yet manufacturing them demands the greatest level of expertise and highest functionality from the CAM system and machine tools. “We only dealt with turbine blades in the past when we installed polygons into the hub area for power transmission”, says John P. Giger, Polygona’s managing director. “That was”, he continues, “a stressful job that entailed major risk, because, during polygon machining, the expensive turbine blade could be damaged.” To improve the situation for Polygona, Giger and his colleagues considered manufacturing complete impellers themselves.

To make milling of turbine blades as simple as possible

OPEN MIND extended this basic hyperMILL^® system by developing a multiblade package. It helps to make milling these kinds of turbine blades as simple as possible for users. With this package, all strategies required for machining impellers and blisks are easily defined. In addition to general applications such as roughing, hub finishing and blade finishing, the machining strategies also include more specialised applications. Automated functions keep the number of parameters that need to be defined to a minimum, and owing to the self-explanatory, intuitive graphics-based user interface, the purpose and function of each parameter is readily understood.

Thomas Beutler, Team Leader for Simultaneous Milling at Polygona, remarks: “We were actually able to completely mill the impeller – all the way through to fine finishing.” In this process, the system’s simulation options played a major role, as did the resulting collision-free program, confirms Giger: “Ever since starting to work with hyperMILL^® two years ago, we have never had a single collision.” With help from their partners, Polygona has managed to achieve a truly impressively high level of quality that has been confirmed by customers, and “we are competitive in terms of pricing”, says a satisfied Giger.

www.polygona.ch