The popularity of advanced materials is reaching beyond the aerospace and automotive markets
Consumer demand for high end products such as carbon fiber bicycles, golf clubs, musical instruments, fishing poles and other products continues to grow. See this article for more information on the everyday uses of carbon fiber.
If you are a manufacturer of composite parts, cutting prepreg carbon or glass by hand is both tedious and time consuming. Automated cutting equipment is the first step in reining in manufacturing costs and improving cut part production, but don’t stop there. You may be using an automated cutting machine but not using auto-nesting software. Therefore you are still wasting both time and material. With the expense of prepreg materials, even a little waste will add up to thousands of dollars in no time.
Auto-nesting saves time and reduces waste with immediate, measurable results
Using auto-nesting software can reduce the amount of time spent nesting for your cutting table to approximately 60 seconds. This includes nesting with constraints such as cutting on the 45° or the 90°.
For nesting on composite materials, you have control:
- Set the rotation constraint; 45°, 90°, 180°
- Pre-nest patterns before auto-nesting around the placed parts
- Set pattern quotas
- Works as a plugin to Autometrix PatternSmith
- Will integrate with a projector system for kitting cut part pick up
- Compatible with Workflow software (cut parts order management) for even greater efficiency and time savings
- If you nest more patterns than will fit on your cutting table, the auto-nesting software will create the second, and third tables to be cut, all the way up to 99 tables!
The examples below provides 33.8” material savings and 8.13 minutes in time savings vs. hand nesting.
Example 1. Two tables hand nested. Total nesting time 9.13 minutes, total material used 243.57” provides 74.63% efficiency.
Example 2. Two tables auto nested with Scapos. Total nesting time 1 minute, total material used 209.77” providing 85.15% efficiency.
If you’re ready to stop leaving money on the cutting table, give Autometrix a call, and put auto-nesting software to work for you. Request a free demo!
Terri Van Wagner is the Software Sales Specialist for Autometrix, Inc. Contact her at software@autometrix.com or call 530-615-2101