Many key industries need large and heavy components in high precision quality either directly in their products, in the tools they use or in their production facilities. Examples are energy, aviation, mining, shipbuilding, transportation and the automotive industry. Big components are manufactured on even bigger machines. These manufacturing centres have severe disadvantages like high prices and high demand in space. Therefore, they are only economically viable in few locations, which are seldom at the usage site of the big components. This results in the need of transportation of heavy parts. These transports are expensive, time consuming and impact the environment and infrastructure. The current situation has an especially negative impact on repairs and modifications of large components, because even small amounts of machining cannot be carried out without transporting them back and forth from usage site to production site and vice versa. A few hours machining task can take up to three weeks to finish.
Picum MT has the answer to this problem. We offer a highly accurate mobile machining platform. Picum reverses the principle “the workpiece comes to the machine”. Our system comes to the workpiece. Transport of the relatively light Picum is much easier than of the corresponding workpieces. Hence, CO2 emissions are reduced as well as heavy transports, which strain the traffic infrastructure, if a Picum is transported instead of the heavy workpiece. Furthermore, the technology encourages repairs and modifications of big components instead of their replacement with new parts. This way, we extend their life cycles, which saves resources and energy. The modular Picum combines with arc-welding and milling additive and subtractive processing technologies in one system.
A challenge of the new technology is the positioning of the machine in relation to the workpiece. We can only achieve high accuracy if the positioning is accurate. The Picum is equipped with high-end optical measurement devices to solve this problem. These are currently operated manually. Automation of the positioning is a final piece in the puzzle. This way set-up times will be reduced, which increases competitiveness with the established processes for more use cases. Furthermore, automation of positioning will allow Picum to machine large areas in one go, which opens completely new applications like 3D-printing of large components. The size of the part is not restricted anymore by machine size when using a Picum, because the Picum can move around the part while printing.
