AMB 2014 to showcase Metal Working Innovation Tour

According to the organiser, over 90,000 visitors are expected to attend this year's event. The well-established special show of the Institute for Production Management, Technology and Machine Tools (PTW) at Darmstadt Technical University is an integral part of AMB. Under the motto ‘Metal Working Innovation Tour - Trends of Tomorrow', visitors will be accompanied through a total of four thematic clusters, i.e. lean machining, energy efficiency, deburring innovation and complete process-reliable machining, by experts from science and industry. The continuous improvement in efficiency, process reliability and productivity will also pose a challenge for metal working companies in future. This year, the PTW has again set itself the task of offering visitors to AMB a programme designed to cope with these challenges. With its unique stand concept at AMB 2014, PTW will try to cope with the narrow time window and satisfy the request by visitors to obtain detailed information about the currently most important trends in production engineering. The result is a compact innovation tour through significant topic areas of metal working with considerable productivity potential. 19 exhibitors will present the latest developments in the field of metal working on a stand area of 540m². Two visitors tours every day and the cluster assignment of the individual topic areas will provide a structured and detailed insight into the trends of tomorrow. Keeping metal cutting flowing through efficient process organisation: the lean machining cluster will show visitors how to organise a lean production cell which can be used to attain single piece flow in metalcutting. Detailed information will be provided here about the use of lean production methods in metal cutting - from the lean machine tool and the use of tool monitoring systems to detect errors at source through to virtual shopfloor management. One highlight for visitors: a suitable table stand for their smart phone will be produced live. Deburring is a non-value-adding, but still indispensable machining step which is often carried out manually. Studies prove that edge machining and deburring of precision components can account for up to 30% of the entire component costs. In order to automate this very time-consuming and expensive process, the deburring innovation cluster will present CAM-aided deburring and a newly developed tool for deburring internal intersecting curves. CAD-aided deburring will be presented live during the exhibition. The focal point of the complete process-reliable machining cluster will be process reliability both in the manufacture of prototypes and in series production. The topic of process reliability will be illustrated by means of a gear unit and will require both precisely produced gear wheels and process-reliable machining of the gearbox housing (e.g. of the bearing seat). During AMB 2014, there will be a live demonstration of process-reliable milling of gear wheels on a 5-axis machining centre. Visitors will also be able to see a new transfer centre, which can be flexibly changed to other workpieces, and a six-station crown turret with a MMS 2 canal system.    Rising energy prices and high cost pressure are two reasons why energy efficiency in manufacturing industry is very important. Lower energy consumption in production is increasingly becoming an important competitive factor for companies. In view of this situation, visitors to the energy efficiency cluster will see energetically optimised machine components and production machines. The research and demonstration project η-factory will also be presented. Thoughts on energy efficiency are being taken one step further in this project. In addition to energetic improvement in individual production plants, the energetic analysis includes energetic networking, the machine peripherals, building engineering services and the factory building. The exhibitors in the Innovation Tour will include tool manufacturers, component manufacturers, machine manufacturers, software suppliers and service providers. The stand arrangement will provide visitors with a clearly structured tour of the individual topic clusters. In the centre of the exhibition area, the old timer double decker bus will enable visitors to talk to experts, cultivate contacts and forge new contacts (PTW Innovation Tour in Hall 5, Stand D32). AMB 2014 is being supported by the promotional supporters VDMA Precision Tools Association, VDMA Software Association and the Association of German Machine Tool Manufacturers (VDW). www.messe-stuttgart.de/amb