Based at Finglas, close to Dublin International Airport, Allied Automation was established in 1998 and manufactures bespoke, automated assembly machines used by many of the world’s leading medical, pharmaceutical and life science companies.
Since its foundation, the company has delivered over 2,500 engineering projects to clients in Ireland, the UK, mainland Europe, the USA and the Middle East.
Production Manager Owen Donnelly says the company has recently completed a 15 month-long project for an assembly and test machine for feeding various sizes of catheters, coiling them on multiple mandrels, stripping them and loading them into sterile pouches and sealing them — at a rate of 30 a minute.
Another project related to a high-precision robotic process for grinding radii on blade edges. These blades are used by orthopaedic surgeons for cutting bone during surgical procedures.
A robot picks the blade from an in-feed fixture, presents it to a grinding wheel, precisely manipulating it to create the precision radii on four edges before placing it back on an out-feed carrier.
Allied Automation’s machines, which can contain up to 5,000 components, vary in size from small bench top assembly aids to 6 x 2.5m standalone machines.
Mr Donnelly says the company completes everything in-house: design, development, production, electrics, pneumatics process control, vision inspection and robotics. All parts are produced in Allied Automations tool room on CNC milling machines and lathes controlled by Alphacam software (
www.alphacam.com).
“Our biggest challenge was getting components manufactured in the most efficient way. Since introducing Alphacam this has really increased the speed of tool-path creation, with the introduction of Alphacam’s Waveform Roughing technique in particular significantly reducing the overall machining time.”
Tool-maker Daniel Monaghan says: “Originally, we feared that ramping up the feeds and speeds as recommended by Alphacam would damage our cutting tools, so we ran the cycles slowly at first. As soon as we realised how
efficiently the software worked our confidence grew and we pushed it to the limit.
“This is how we work our machines now and it is cutting our rough machining cycle times by as much as a half.” He says it also prolongs tool life.
“Machining the conventional way, the cutters would last two months. However, with waveform machining and using the full cutter flute length rather than just the bottom end of the tool, they don’t need replacing for six months — and the finishing cutters are lasting for eight months. It’s saving us a lot of money on cutting tools.”
He adds that a step-by-step procedure of using Alphacam begins when he imports a drawing from SolidWorks and decides on the type of tooling required.
“I extract the solid model and check the radii to see what size cutters are required, including any ball-nose cutters for 3-D milling. Then I check what roughing cycles are required for pockets and holes, and any 3-D work.”