Renishaw, a world leader in precision engineering technologies, has revealed a range of new metrology and additive manufacturing equipment at IMTEX 2017, which is taking place at the Bangalore International Exhibition Centre from 26th January to 1st February. The new products were announced in a speech made yesterday at the company's exhibition stand by Mr Dominic McAllister, the British Deputy High Commissioner, Bengaluru.

In his speech, Mr McAllister praised Renishaw's long term commitment to India which has been hugely beneficial to both the company and the local economy. He said, “Renishaw has been trading in India since 1983 and today it employs 350 highly skilled people across the country, including a wholly owned subsidiary here in Bangalore and a large facility in Pune. Many of its employees in India directly contribute to the R&D and manufacture of its exciting measurement and metal 3D printing technologies which are being demonstrated at IMTEX.”

The new products announced by Mr McAllister are designed to meet the requirements of the advanced manufacturing sector in India; from the need to produce parts with increasing complexity and tighter tolerances, to the drive to reduce costs, to increase speed of operation and the requirement to improve the ease-of-use for new technology.

In June 2016 Renishaw opened an Additive Manufacturing Solutions Centre at its Pune site, which aims to increase the adoption of metal 3D printing technologies by Indian manufacturers. At IMTEX the company introduced the RenAM 500M additive manufacturing system, which the Deputy High Commissioner said “has been fully designed to be used for serialised production of complex metal components directly from CAD using metal powder fusion technology.” Highlights of the system include a Renishaw designed and engineered optical system with dynamic focussing, automated powder sieving and recirculation, a 500 W ytterbium fibre laser and patented high capacity dual filter SafeChange™ system.

As demands on component tolerances increase, manufacturers are now required to consider all error sources from the machines producing parts; angular errors as well as linear and straightness errors. Therefore at IMTEX, the Deputy High Commissioner also announced Renishaw's new XM-60 multi-axis calibrator which is capable of measuring all six degrees of freedom from a single set-up, in any orientation for linear axes. It offers significant improvement in simplicity and time saving over conventional laser measurement techniques. The XM-60 uses the XC-80 environmental compensator to correct for environmental conditions.

The Deputy High Commissioner also announced the India launch of Renishaw's new vision measurement probe (RVP) for use with the REVO-2 5-axis measurement system on co-ordinate measuring machines. Thin sheet metal parts, components with large numbers of holes (as small as 0.5 mm), and parts which are not suited to tactile measurement can now be fully inspected with the RVP system. The new probe increases the multi-sensor capability of REVO-2 by adding non-contact inspection to the existing touch-trigger, high-speed tactile scanning and surface finish measurement capability of the system.

In addition to these key new products, visitors to Renishaw's IMTEX stand were also able to see the company's new high productivity machining cell concept which demonstrates how the ability to monitor key process inputs, analyse data and continuously improve manufacturing processes facilitates increased productivity and higher accuracy. The company believes that simply measuring the output of a manufacturing process using ‘tailgate' inspection is not enough and, more often, too late to control all the variability in that process. It is critical that checks and measurements are also made before, during and immediately after machining to control both common-cause and special-cause variation.

Also demonstrated were the new MODUS™ 2 metrology software suite which simplifies the programming of CMMs, plus Renishaw's full suite of machine tool probes, calibration products, metrology fixtures, styli and position encoders, including the new VIONiC™ digital encoder and the Queen's Award winning RESOLUTE™ absolute encoder.

• Follow @CNCTimes