Design And Development Of CNC Flame Cutting System Driven By CAD Graphics

Splitting and separating is the first procedure of mechanical processing for steel plates,cutting speed and accuracy will directly affect the subsequent processing.Flame cutting serves as an important cutting mean being widely used for its good cutting quality,lager cutting thickness,lower cost,less equipment investment etc.With the ever?rising requirement about flexibility in flame cutting process,traditional CNC flame cutting machine can't meet the demands,because it has the limitation of no opening system,single function,and difficulty in maintenance.Aiming at the deficiencies,the visual graphic path processing,control software,and the adaptive compensation function along Z axis of open CNC flame cutting system was designed and developed in this paper,which based on Windows operation system and Visual Basic developing platform.Main contents includes as followings:1)Hardware structure and control method of the opening flame cutting system was designed on the basis of the existing flame cutting technology.The main control devices consist of industrial personal computer IPC,motion control card,data acquisition card and laser displacement sensor,etc.The functions of motion control,data acquisition,digital output control were realized by PCI communication between the hardware.2)According to the control requirements of the flame cutting system,the interpolation of machining,tool compensation,Z axis height compensation,working status tracking and other functions of the system were realized through VB programming.3)DXF file was analyzed in detail,and tool path was generated by extracting processing object features and by reading group code stored in DXF files.With the combination of the computer graphics theory and numerical control technology,the purpose of CAD graphics?driven processing was achieved,by which the operational procedure for flame cutting was simplified.4)With building the mathematical model of cutting path optimization,ant colony algorithm was used to sort the processing objects,optimize the cutting path,reduce the empty stroke in machining process,by which the processing time was saved effectively.Practical test results showed that it has overcome the shortcomings of poor openness,imperfect function,difficult maintenance in traditional flame cutting equipment,and has a good function of human?computer interaction and better stability.