Tool design for the production of a collimator on a 3-axes vertical milling centre
type: CreativeWork
description: The continuous quest for modernization and industrialization has brought a great challenge upon the third world countries such as Zambia in that these countries have to keep on importing production machinery whose spares cannot be obtained locally but from outside. This problem has been compounded by these countries' lack of funds to acquire machinery that could produce the much-needed spares. However, the high cost of initial investment of Computer Numeric Control (CNC) machines is a huge obstacle to many companies. It is, therefore, imperative that avenues of adapting these machines to perform a variety of operations than what they were initially designed for are sought and thereby make the investment much more cost effective. A cobalt refinery plant at Chambishi Metals Pic running at normal capacity consumes about one collimator in every three to four weeks. The cost of replacement of each collimator is approximately US$3800 from Mitutoyo and Fowyer in America. Chambishi Metals Pic notes that it is spending thousands of dollars in importing the component and is looking for means to have local manufacturers to produce it locally since this would be cheaper and readily available. However, local companies have so far failed to achieve the required tolerances using conventional machining and have very little or no capacity in ordering CNC machine tools.The collimator assembly is a water-cooled frontal electrode, used on the plasma arc torch. This torch is used in the reheating of the alloy prior to atomizing. A collimator is an assembly made up of two separate components whose metallurgical composition is 90 to 99 percent copper. In order to accommodate plasma gas flow, process thermodynamics and to prevent coolant leakages, collimator components are normally produced by precision machining, a process that is best performed on CNC lathe machine tools. It is for this reason that it was identified as a test piece for production. In 2001, Mwanza S. M.,University of Zamb…
abstract: The continuous quest for modernization and industrialization has brought a great challenge upon the third world countries such as Zambia in that these countries have to keep on importing production machinery whose spares cannot be obtained locally but from outside. This problem has been compounded by these countries' lack of funds to acquire machinery that could produce the much-needed spares. However, the high cost of initial investment of Computer Numeric Control (CNC) machines is a huge obstacle to many companies. It is, therefore, imperative that avenues of adapting these machines to perform a variety of operations than what they were initially designed for are sought and thereby make the investment much more cost effective. A cobalt refinery plant at Chambishi Metals Pic running at normal capacity consumes about one collimator in every three to four weeks. The cost of replacement of each collimator is approximately US$3800 from Mitutoyo and Fowyer in America. Chambishi Metals Pic notes that it is spending thousands of dollars in importing the component and is looking for means to have local manufacturers to produce it locally since this would be cheaper and readily available. However, local companies have so far failed to achieve the required tolerances using conventional machining and have very little or no capacity in ordering CNC machine tools.The collimator assembly is a water-cooled frontal electrode, used on the plasma arc torch. This torch is used in the reheating of the alloy prior to atomizing. A collimator is an assembly made up of two separate components whose metallurgical composition is 90 to 99 percent copper. In order to accommodate plasma gas flow, process thermodynamics and to prevent coolant leakages, collimator components are normally produced by precision machining, a process that is best performed on CNC lathe machine tools. It is for this reason that it was identified as a test piece for production. In 2001, Mwanza S. M.,University of Zamb…
author: Malama, Terence
language: en
keywords: Collimators (optical instrument)
date published: 2011-07-14
date modified: 2026-07-27T22:06:05Z
provider: University of Zambia
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Zambia