Technology for Shipbuilding Affordability

STEP-NC is a feature driven language for machine control with profound consequences for the efficiency of design and manufacturing. For design it means more concise, descriptive information can be sent to manufacturing making the process of design moreefficient. For manufacturing it means faster, safer and more flexible machining because a control can dynamically check the safety and optimize the performance of a part program at run time. This proposal will apply STEP-NC to pipe bending for shipbuilding. For general purpose manufacturing operations the benefits of STEP-NC have been estimated as a 35% reduction in set-up time, a 75% reduction in the number of drawings required on the shop floor, and a 50% decrease in machining time for small tomid-sized job lots due to increased usage of 5-axis and high speed machines. This proposal will extend these advantages to pipe bending by allowing the MMAP system currently used by GDEB and NNS to control pipe bending to be deployed across the USshipbuilding industry.