History of Numerical Control development - Essay Example

HISTORY OF NUMERICAL CONTROL DEVELOPMENT Development and implementation of the Numerical Control process Introduction Numerical control is the automation of operated by commands that are abstractly programmed and encoded on a medium of storage. If not automated machine tools are just controlled in a manual way by way of levers or hand wheels or automated mechanically through cams only. The United States air force is credited for the development of numerical control.1They saw the need of developing methods of manufacturing that are more efficient for modern aircraft.

With the coming of the Second World War those components that were used for fabricating jet aircraft turned to be more complex thereby needing more machining. Most of this machining incorporated milling operations. Because of this the air force had to sponsor a research project for the development of a prototype numerical control milling machine at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The production of the prototype was done by retrofitting a conventional tracer mill with numerical control servomechanisms for the machine’s three axes.

2The very first demonstration for this Numerical Control machine was done in 1952 March by the MIT Labs. The builders of the machine tool slowly by slowly started to develop projects that they could use to introduce the Numerical Control units. Also some industry users more so the builders of airframes started working to make numerical control machines so that they could satisfy their production needs. The Air force went with encouraging people to develop the Numerical Control by through the sponsorship of more research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in order to design a language for programming for use in controlling Numerical Control machines.

The very first Numerical Control machines came about in the 1940s into the 50s. They were built based on the tolls present at that time which had been modified with motors that could move the controls to follow the points that were fed in the system on a punched tape. 3These servomechanisms were augmented rapidly with digital and analogue computers thus creating the computer numerical control (CNC) machine tools known today which have gone ahead to revolutionize the process of machining. In the current CNC systems the end to end design of the component is automated very highly by use of a computer assisted design as well as computer assisted manufacturing (CAM) programs.

The programs bring forth a computer file that when interpreted extract every command required for the operation of a specific machine through a postprocessor and thereafter loaded in Computer Numerical Control machines for production. Because any given component could need certain different tools to be used such as saws, drills among other, modern machines normally combine multiple tools into one cell. In some other cases different machines may be used together with external controllers and robotic and human operators that can take the component from one machine to the other.

In both of these two cases the complex steps that are required to produce any particular part is automated highly and brings forth a part which is closely matching the original design of the Computer Aided Design.4At one time in the history of the numerical control process there was the switching from paper to mylar tapes that are mechanically stronger in numerical control operations. USB flash drives, Floppy diskettes, and local area networking are currently being used as a replacement of the tapes to a certain degree in highly integrated larger environments.

Bibliography Hood-Daniel, Patrick and Kelly, James Floyd. Build your own CNC machine (Technology in action series) Apress, 2009.Smid, Peter (2008), CNC Programming Handbook (3rd ed.), New York: Industrial Press,Siegel, Arnold. "Automatic Programming of Numerically Controlled Machine Tools", Control Engineering, Volume 3 Issue 10 (October 1956), pp. 65–70