Mechanical engineering: Circular flushing
One-piece and assembly-free manufactured
A well-known ‘automation partner to Swiss industry’ utilises the advantages of additive manufacturing for the production of its milling machine air shower.
This air shower is used to clean tools or chip waste from milling machines. It has an internal channel whose walls are gas-tight to 5 bar with a wall thickness of 1 mm.
The advantages of additive manufacturing, in this case selective laser sintering technology, are obvious: whereas the previous version consisted of several parts that had to be assembled, the air shower is now additively manufactured in series in one piece and without assembly.
An exciting side effect: if the geometry of the air shower needs to be adapted to the milling head diameter at a later date, for example, this can be done quickly, within days, without the need for time-consuming, expensive tool modifications.
Figure 1: Circular flushing with channel
Fig. 2: Air shower geometry for additive manufacturing
Fig. 3: Air shower interior geometry
