Programming a Press
Koninklijke Philips N.V. (Royal Philips, commonly known as Philips) is a Dutch engineering and electronics multinational. The headquarter is situated in Amsterdam, but there is also an important branch situated in Drachten which is known for its production of shaving-razors.
The department of Shaving Calibration and Maintenance in Drachten does material testing and research as well. In certain research they also make use of a press to (de)form or test different materials for various applications. This is the area that my case was about.
Initially it was planned that the case was about building a bridge between the internal programming of the press and the way the department works with data. The internal programming language of the press is quite low level and function orientated. So it is not desired for normal users to write or change program code of the press but to use a tool which processes the input automatically. That way non experts of the press programming can work with press.
Unfortunately the programming and set up of the press was not as far as intended and the case had to be modified.
The updated case was to test and verify the two programmed scenarios, the tensile test and clicking plate test. After that the third scenario, the forging test, had to be worked out.
During the case I had to familiarize myself with the programming language of the press and design the forging program. The first scenarios were programmed by an employee of Bosch-Rexroth which was the collaboration partner of Philips to get the press up and running. To get the third scenario right I also worked together with Bosch-Rexroth for the programming part and with Philips to design the scenario in such a way that it works as intended.
