Enhanced CNC machines capabilities by adding circular patterns cycle

Holes in multiple circular patterns exist in several recent industrial parts such as antennas, heat exchanger support plates, condensers, boilerplates, trammel screens and separators. There is a lot of difficulty in preparing CNC programs using conventional programming or canned cycle programming. This study illustrates an effort to establish a practical common algorithm allowing the drilling of holes arranged in multiple circular patterns. The programmed algorithm can easily be adapted to any modern CNC unit to create a user cycle or subroutine. To test the capabilities of this algorithm, two case studies were developed. The first used the Numeripth800-B CNC unit equipped with a horizontal Orion-500 machining center, and the second case study was developed using the Sinumeric 840-D equipped with a vertical Emco machining center. A number of samples were produced successfully. The new algorithm shows high efficiency in the part program establishment and offers the advantage of decreasing the encoding errors.