hyperMILL® provides a broad set of cutter path strategies ranging from 2.5D through 5-axis, plus mill-turn, and also with specialty applications for multi-blade and single-blade turbomachinery, tire molds and dental restorative components. Recent product development and new licenses have included applications for the aerospace, energy, and defense business matching the west coast market.
One example is the innovative shape-offset roughing and finishing techniques that are used for programming shaped surfaces. Techniques exist for pocket roughing, side-wall finishing and rest machining. The roughing has an innovative option utilizing the hyperMAXX® high performance roughing module, based on Celeritive's Volumill(TM) kernel. This roughing technique brings high performance roughing to multi-axis applications. The entire suite of shape-offset methods is used for 4- or 5-axis machining, depending on the source geometry. Applications may be for engine casing, structural components, tire molds, or cylindrical roll-dies.
The turbomachinery solutions have recently achieved high praise from new users. Recent enhancements have focused on reducing roughing cycle times and improving surface finish and machining cycle times with newer smoothing techniques. "The multi-blade turbomachinery application has been well-received in the market, clearly surpassing the performance of general-purpose CAM solutions and being competitive with single-purpose niche applications, that are limited when you need to turn the outer contours or machine associated hardware", states Alan Levine, Managing Director of OPEN MIND Technologies USA.
OPEN MIND also develops and offers custom postprocessors for milling machines and mill-turn machines that take advantage of advanced machine control functions. Customers often overlook the importance of a solid postprocessor. The postprocessors are often linked to custom machine models, used with OPEN MIND's material removal and collision checking simulation utility, or by export to third party programs such as CG Tech's Vericut® and Spring's NC Simul.