Polygona
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Specialised expertise - highest quality hyperMILL® enables complete milling of impellers: Customers of Polygona AG, based in Jona, Switzerland, testify to the excellent technical level of their impellers, even though the company began production only two years ago. Polygona’s debut in this... About Polygona Polygona has more than 50 years experience in the polygon profile production. Main segments of its components are in turbine and cooling plant, compressors, motor sports (several F1 teams, Le Mans Series, DTM, Rally and others), medical technology, mechanical and electrical industry, engineering and construction of recycling machinery and many others. ...industry was able to succeed thanks to assistance from a machine tool manufacturer and OPEN MIND Technologies AG as their CAD/CAM supplier. An impeller is a propeller that is enclosed in a ringshaped housing. It is sometimes referred to as a shrouded propeller. By lowering the induced media resistance (air, water, etc.) on the blades, the casing increases the propeller’s efficiency. Blade wheels of this sort are used in energy generation, compressed air generation or ship propulsion, to name but a few examples. Closed impellers are becoming increasingly important. Yet manufacturing them demands the greatest level of expertise and highest functionality from the CAM system and machine tools. Polygona AG was aware of this when they steered into this business two years ago. Founded in 1976, the company had previously focused primarily on the manufacture of high-precision polygons that are in global demand, with customers even including Formula 1 racing teams. “We only dealt with turbine blades in the past when we installed polygons into the hub area for power transmission”, says John P. Giger, Polygona’s managing director. “That was”, he continues, “a stressful job that entailed major risk, because, during polygon machining, the expensive turbine blade could be damaged.“ To improve the situation for Polygona, Giger and his colleagues considered manufactu- They have successfully entered the business of machining impellers end-to-end: John P. Giger, Managing Director (right) and Matthias Konig, Application Engineer at Polygona AG. © OPEN MIND Technologies AG. 1

“Our experiences with hyperMILL and OPEN MIND havebeen very positive.” ® John P. Giger, Managing Director Finding the right partners Polygona then began to look around for partners that could help them to expand the new business, and they found a Swiss machine manufacturer and OPEN MIND Technologies AG as their CAD/CAM supplier. ring complete impellers themselves. There were a few limiting factors that had to be considered: n M otivated and qualified employees who were nonetheless inexperienced in this particular area had to be able to figure out the required technologies quickly. T he...

Experiences “Our experiences with hyperMILL and OPEN MIND have been very positive”, says John Giger. “We were able to familiarise ourselves with the system very quickly in order to reliably generate NC programs, and we were then able to mill the parts ourselves on the machine”, remarks Thomas Beutler, Team Leader for Simultaneous Milling at Polygona. ® Additionally, technical feasibility became so much clearer thanks to this solution. We were actually able to completely mill the impeller – all the way through to fine finishing. In this process, the system’s simulation options played a major...