CHINT Goes Paper Free

A case study on how CHINT adopted ETMX and Expert Electrode (XE) to streamline electrode modeling and design process for any tool project that requires electrical discharge machining.

Design Process Inefficiencies

CHINT’s tooling department uses CREO for mold design. However, the electrode design used to carry out with the AUTOCAD:

The original approach flow:

Create mold parts in 2D drawings in CREO, and then export the DXF format.
Open the DXF document in AutoCAD, copy 2D geometry of three 3D state views.
Trim 2D lines.
Mark the size of electrode coordinate dimensioning and pulse depth.
Export 2D electrodes drawing to CNC machining department.
Hand-draft the “workflow” card
Hand-draft single electrode preparation list

Manual data input Methods

” Spend hours just to export drawing, for every mold design change, we need to re-export drawing which affect the whole mold development process”

said engineers at CHINT.

Engineer could not process interference check for electrode design using Autocad. If error found in stage of EDM, it would inevitably impact their production lead time.

In the past, all electrode design processes were tracked and record manually on paper. There was no standard tracking and record procedure in place. The complete set of electrodes sometimes required more than 100 cards. Engineers had to repeat the process of manual fill-in even they know it was a duplicate effort.

Manual input of electrode preparation list resulted in missing electrodes. Engineers had to check dimensions of each electrode one by one. These manual electrode data input methods led to significant discrepancies

An Integrated Solution

Expert Electrode (XE) is an innovative, intuitive intelligent design tool for electrode design. ETMX incorporates knowledge of modern tooling industry standards, methods and electrode design experience. Engineer can quickly perform automatic electrode design, generate engineering drawings and automatically transfer relevant data to BOM list.

Improve Efficiency and Quality of Electrode Design

To achieve these objectives, CHINT’s tooling department adopted 3D mold design and standardization, XE and ETMX played a critical role to help them achieve the goal.

XE fully integrated into the design of the electrode base on CREO environment. XE contains electrodes tooling data processing sector, and with ETMX where all electrodes being produced are automatically identified for their attributes. Engineers no longer need to fill in a single preparation sheet manually.

XE can easily provide the electrode fixture, help CNC processing department to identify the direction, which helps automate pulse processing.

Results: After adopting XE and ETMX, CHINT tooling department has optimized efficiency by 500%. “The improvement is impressive!” Their design team leader said.

About CHINT

CHINT is a leading manufacturer in the Low-voltage electrical, Power Transmission and Distribution industries in China.

More information regarding the company can be found at
http://www.chint.com