Education, education, education

When senior representatives of four leading vendors of linear motion systems and components recently came together to Hawley Mill, they came up with the idea of working together to educate engineers about just what linear motion systems can do and how they might achieve best possible results in their designs. Even we were surprised at the quite mind blowing performances that they said were now possible with their equipment, limited in many cases only by the laws of physics and the environment they work in, and so we at Findlay Publications intend to put our weight behind their move to disseminate this knowledge more widely. Aerotech sells linear motors and X-Y systems with accuracies as fine as 50nm, which is about one twentieth the size of the average bacterium, with motion speeds of more than 10m/s, accelerations of up to 5g, and able to deliver forces of up to 5000N. Dr Cliff Joliffe qualified this by pointing out that these performances were only possible with air or magnetic bearings and machine performances were usually limited by the rest of the mechanics. Not to be outdone, Ian Oliver of Renishaw revealed that his company sold encoders with resolutions down to 80 pico metres, and that one customer had interpolated this down to 6 picometres, although he qualified this by saying that such resolutions were meaningless unless working in a vacuum under conditions of strictly controlled temperature. To give some idea of what this means, most atoms in solids are just over 100 pico metres across. At the other end of the scale, THK sells ballscrews and slide systems that range from one 1mm across, to devices that can carry up to 780 tonnes and are used in Japan to support whole buildings. Operating temperatures are in the range -74 deg C to + 150 deg C and Robert Love of THK reported growth in sales last year as being 22% to 25%. Matthew Aldridge of igus said that his company could do up to 250 deg C without external lubrication and that his products were generally cheaper than slides using rolling element bearings provided they could, "Do the job", within speed envelopes up to 15m/s. The problem for all such vendors, and for their potential customers, is that not enough people know these things. As most of our readers will undoubtedly agree, those present at the meeting considered that engineers just out of college or university don't know a lot, and designing at the leading edge of what is possible is often both hard and complicated. Cliff Joliffe complained that there is no single information source that contains all the knowledge necessary to allow anyone to design a complete system. Engineers just out of college could just about, "Put an encoder on a ballscrew." Robert Love interjected that, "You first need the right ballscrew", and added that electronics is, "Becoming bigger in terms of telling the ballscrew where it should be so that ballscrews can be made less accurate." Ian Oliver commented that there seems to be a, "Complete void" between what is taught in electrical and mechanical engineering degrees. In order to achieve proper control of precision systems, engineers needed to understand "Metrology" including software techniques such as use of lookup tables. Engineers needed to, "Look at all the physics things," and cited the example of a machine installed in India that was not meeting specifications because it was near an open door and subject to gusts of air from the hot Indian climate. The Netherlands on the other hand, was apparently the country to emulate, with enthusiastic and knowledgeable engineers, many of whom had been trained during periods working with Philips. Cliff Joliffe spoke of the good links between industry and academia and the way engineers from different backgrounds were happy to work together. Much of the Netherlands, is of course, below sea level, and it has long depended on the competence of and co-operative spirit among it engineers for its very survival against flooding. On the British scene, none of those present at the discussion were complacent about the lack of knowledge and all four vendors spoke at length about their efforts to combat it, despite many difficulties. Cliff Joliffe said that, "We charge for training, but we also produce a free book, which is consistently the biggest download from our website." (We presume this refers to the 'Engineering Reference at http://www.aerotech.com/products/pdf/EngineeringRef.pdf). Matthew Aldrige explained that his company did not charge for its training services, "But our products are simpler. Two of three times a week guys go to companies to teach them and we are trying to get more involved with universities." Robert Love informed us, "We have quite a large sales force and run seminars from Milton Keynes or we can take our mini exhibition and do seminars at customer premises. We also have a tour bus." Ian Oliver then capped this, "We do a phenomenal amount of seminars and training. We have always had to educate people about how to fit a probe on a machine tool. In the UK, there is a decline in the thirst to be educated. We have to have a partnership with people like yourselves [the other vendors] to move the market forward." This was followed up by Cliffe Joliffe, "What I am always interested in is looking at the building blocks. The word 'partnership' would be a nice way of working together." This led onto a fairly wide ranging discussion about a whole host of topics, but the four representatives kept coming back to the problem of how they could best work together to promote what they have to offer. No solution seemed to provide all the answers. On seminars at exhibitions, Matthew Aldridge recalled, "For the first one we held, two people turned up. Next time we offered free beer, and six people came, including the two who came the first time." Ian Oliver observed, "We do seminars. Some of the guys who come are phenomenally bright" and later, "Technical partnerships work. If I talk about encoders in a seminar, I also have to talk about what might make the ballscrews get hot in the middle." Nobody thought that the problem of knowledge could be solved by software. Matthew Aldridge observed that, "Our dream was that our customers would do all the work themselves using our software, but they still need to ring up and check, and when they do, they often find they have made a mistake. However, the software does help our image and helps our sales people." Cliff Joliffe commented that the configurators his company had to offer were restricted to the products they sold, and did not address the problems of designing them into a system. There was some discussion of what sort of event or class designers would find useful, and nobody liked the idea of a day of Power Point presentations. It then came down more to the idea of some kind of practical design workshop, involving real equipment, which the vendors would bring along, but the one thing that we all agreed on is that YOU the readers out there engaged in designing products need to tell US what you want. Aerotech Igus (UK) Renishaw THK U.K. Aerotech Igus (UK) Renishaw THK U.K. Aerotech Engineering Reference Pointers D/T/A-Text: It is possible to make linear motion systems with almost any performances designers might care to imagine, limited only by the laws of physics and the cost the end customer is willing to pay D/T/A-Text: Four leading vendors have expressed their desire to work together to help designers in their tasks to produce the best and most economical products D/T/A-Text: YOU the readers have to tell us, and them, what form you would most like this to take