Intelligent Cnc Pipe Bending Equipment Control System Development

Pipe bender is the most important equipment which is used for bending pipe fittings. Numerical control technology is core part of pipe bender CNC system. Developing high-tech smart CNC system is very significant for improving core competitive power among equipment manufacturing industry. It's also meaningful for upgrading country's comprehensive national power.This paper gives out a multi-functional pipe bender's CNC system with excellent performance. Its hardware structure is industry PC plus motion control card. Numerous software and hardware resources in the Windows platform are utilized in the CNC system. The paper pays most attention to the developing of system's software. Some key technology and main problem are researched and investigated deeply in detail as follows:1. A three-tie architecture is designed based on interface technique for reduce couple degree; make it possible to connect software and hardware flexibly. Thus, one copy of software can be suit for several motion control cards.2. Traditional pipe bender manufactures pipe fittings follow relatively fixed flow. Thus, it can produce few types of pipe fittings and the shape of pipe fittings cannot be too much complex. To solve these problems, this system divides the work flow into more than ten basic actions. This paper puts forward concept of work file. Work file is consisted of these actions. It's used to direct the movement of machine. Compared to traditional manufacturing method, this method can produce much more pipe fittings with different shapes.3. The display structure of work file is organized by bend, step and child step. Edit work file in graphical interface is also allowed. The method of displaying and editing work file can be treated as graphical"G code programming".4. Shape file saves data of pipe's shape. This paper uses XYZ coordinate and YBC coordinate to demonstrate shape of pipe. XYZ coordinate is benefited for observation, and YBC coordinate is used as manufacturing description. If necessary parameters are defined, proper work file can be generated from shape file automatically.5. There are two kinds of control mode in the system, manual control and auto control. The motion control card guarantees real-time requirement. For the purpose of efficient productivity, program uses multi-thread technique to control the movement of different machine component that have no interferences. The problems of pause, resume and recovery in multi-thread environment are also solved perfected.6. Many additional works are done to improve the kindness of human machine interface.