Delcam will demonstrate the latest releases in its range of CADCAM software for mouldmakers at the DMP exhibition to be held in Dongguan, China, from the 18th and 21st November. New releases will be on show of the modelling-for-manufacture CAD system, PowerSHAPE, the PowerMILL CAM system for high-speed and five-axis machining, and the PowerINSPECT inspection software.
The 2016 release of PowerSHAPE Pro software will help users to complete complex tooling designs more quickly and more easily. In addition, a combination of new, more efficient, code and the extension of multi-threaded calculations to many commonly-used tasks will make the software significantly faster than any previous version.
One key enhancement allows groups of features to be copied between two solids in a single operation. While the features do not need to be of the same type, the most common application is expected to be in copying patterns of holes from one solid to another, for example from one mould plate to any other plate in the mould stack.
The main enhancement in PowerMILL 2016 is the ability to mirror complete machining projects in one operation and to maintain automatically the machining characteristics, for example to specify automatically whether climb or conventional milling should be used in each section of the toolpath. Previously, only individual toolpaths could be mirrored.
Automatic mirroring saves considerable time whenever tooling is needed to produce right- and left-hand versions of a part. It will also be faster to program the machining of moulds for symmetrical objects since it will be possible to program one half of the core or cavity and then mirror the toolpaths to generate the complete program.
The latest release of PowerINSPECT makes it easier to complete fast and accurate inspection of complex assemblies, including mould tools. The main improvement for users of CNC CMMs is the addition of support for MCR20 and FCR25 probe change racks. PowerINSPECT can now incorporate probe changes into fully-automated measurement sequences.
The new version also includes automatic feature extraction for point-cloud batch inspection, easier navigation of the history tree, better control over RPS alignments and new options for collision checking.
