STEP-NC-compliant machine automation to support sawblade stone-cutting machining

Abstract

Sawing with circular sawblades is the most extensively used process for granites and stone in general. Although there are major differences between conventional metal cutting and stone cutting processes for construction parts, the need to increase productivity, quality and effectiveness in stone cutting has challenged the stone processing industry to make technological adaptations of successful concepts applied in other processes. The new ISO STEP-NC standard has shown its benefits for conventional metal cutting. STEP-NC has provided the manufacturing community with the basis for interoperability between standard platforms, as well as the way forward for automatic interoperable CNC manufacture of parts from CAD models. The paper presents a STEP-NC technology adaptation to a stone processing scenario with sawblade machines. This adaptation starts with the extension of the STEP-NC data models to cover sawblade stone cutting process requirements. The paper outlines the modelling process. The resulting extended STEP-NC model is used for an implementation of a stone processes CAM to communicate with a prototype STEP-NC-compliant stone disc cutting machine.