Whitney and Waymatic: A Material Cutting and Forming Success Story

A manufacturer of shape cutting equipment uses Yaskawa technology to boost metal cutting quality. Plasma cutting equipment from W.A. Whitney rivals the performance of laser cutting for customer Waymatic Inc., thanks to advanced vibration suppression and model following features built into Yaskawa Sigma Series servo systems.

Transcript

00:00:00 [Music] if you are a metal fabricator this is a thing of beauty plasma cutting steel with smooth and precise curves this technology is used daily at waymatic in South fton Tennessee the smoothness is achieved by a new Whitney model 657 punch plasma machine created by the wa Whitney division of megafab Whitney discovered the performance and

00:00:32 compatibility of Sigma Series Servo systems from yasawa America before Whitney introduced yasawa servos the metal cutting process definitely had its rough spots during the testing of the 657 we discovered the drive system that we selected was not adequate for the job Britney contacted us and gave us the opportunity to put our product on their machine yasawa Servo systems made it

00:00:58 possible for the Whitney 657 to achieve smooth circular Cuts without the need to mechanically tune out the machine's resonant frequencies this reduced time and expense and increased productivity the technology to achieve smoothness of movement is built into yasawa Servo Motors and amplifiers when you're making a circle each of the X and Y axes actually has to go through zero speed

00:01:23 and when you're getting down at zero speed there's very little feedback coming from the encoder so with a very high resolution encoder and the Matched amplifier and motor design we're able to make that transition through the zero speed very smoothly in addition to the mechanical challenges of the project the Whitney team had another obstacle to overcome the calendar the challenges

00:01:46 that Whitney needs to deliver the machine to the customer in 5 days and working with Whitney Engineers we're able to accomplish that the two tuning and the commissioning of the machine in 5 days and have the customer sign off on the machine your scout brought a drive system that could do everything we needed it to do we had the ethercat interface the tuning tools such as autot

00:02:15 tuning vibration suppression Servo tracing and model following and within 10 minutes we had it communicating to the CNC a couple of the techniques that we Ed with mega faab to make it a quick success were vibration suppress and model following these are techniques that are built into the amplifier in vibration suppression the servop pack actually reads the feedback from the

00:02:38 motor and gets a mechanical signature of the machine and is able to detect really mechanical noise and the servopack then uh injects a signal that's 180° out of phase and that cancels out the vibration for the Whitney team the ethercat compatibility of yasawa servos made a big difference ethercat allowed us to select the best servo system for the application it allowed us to come up

00:03:05 with a cost effective solution and not be locked into a proprietary Hardware system ethercat compatibility also gave the end users at waymatic a bonus another benefit of the ethercat interface is it allows us to remotely log in through the internet to the machine control and then also adjust the drive settings so we can do remote tuning from

00:03:26 anywhere the uh ability to be able to network to the Servo drive from the controller the machine was fabulous our old way we didn't couldn't do that we actually had to remove the servo drives send them to the manufacturer if we had any trouble they would rogram them there and send them back so this is you know big step forward we really we really like this to the Whitney team the

00:03:46 biggest benefit of a Sigma Series Servo system was customer satisfaction the new machine the accuracy is there the servos everything we have is has brought us back into what most people demand today from a laser but we're getting it out of plasma so we're able to go at a higher speed on thinner gauge material and we get a more fluid flow through the material fabulous edges finished parts

00:04:07 and we're really happy with that we did look at cost per part on versus even a laser it's a lot less expensive to operate we have less gas all up time and uh hardly any maintenance during the year hey SC we've got a long history of working with the oems and machine builders in the Machine Tool Market we try to help them from the design phase all the way through completion startup

00:04:33 and getting a machine out the door that's what you can expect from Sigma Series Servo Motors amplifiers and controllers from [Music] yasawa