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Energy-saving applications for your CNC control

By Niraj M Wanikar, Chief Editor, CNCTimes.com, 2016-01-12 10:54:00

If you’re looking for ways to reduce your energy costs, look no further than your OSP CNC control. From an engineering perspective, the key is to look for areas in the machining processes that unnecessarily consume energy. Machine tool idling, unnecessary pump rotation and continuous running of peripheral equipment are all energy guzzlers that, when managed, can provide significant savings. Recognizing that advanced CNC control technology can be used to more effectively monitor and manage these wasteful processes, Okuma created the ECO suite system (a part of OSP suite) to handle these tasks.
ECO suite is a next-generation system that saves energy by reducing power consumption during both machine operating and waiting times. Okuma’s ECO suite won the Excellence Award/Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry Award at the 45th Machine Design Awards, sponsored by the Nikkan Kogyo Business & Technology Daily News. ECO suite includes four new intelligent CNC control applications that save on unnecessary energy expenditures, and the results can be quite dramatic. Following are the features you can benefit from with this system.
ECO Idling Stop is the world’s first application that stops machine tool idling. This energy-saving system uses Okuma’s Thermo-Friendly Concept to monitor the cooling status of the milling spindle and the turning spindle, and automatically turns off the coolers for these spindles when cooling is complete.
This application carefully stops peripheral equipment, and the benefits increase with longer machining preparation times. The result is dramatically decreased power consumption when the machine tool is not cutting, and power can even be reduced while cutting with the optional ECO Hydraulics. See Figure 2 for an example showing a 74% decrease in non-cutting power consumption that can be achieved in just one month.
The ECO Power Monitor allows you to see how much energy is being saved – right on the machine tool’s display. Power consumption is shown for spindles, feed axes and peripheral equipment.

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