Original Date: 07/13/1992
Revision Date: 01/18/2007

Watervliet Arsenal (WVA) has designed and implemented a manufacturing cell to produce tensile and charpy test specimens. These ASTM standard tests (ASTM E8 and E23) are required for each gun tube produced by WVA to ensure that the material has sufficient properties to meet the requirements of the specifications.

Previous methods of manufacturing these specimens required the use of conventional machine tools and had a process time of almost five hours per eight specimens produced per tube. The new cell has reduced this time to less than two hours for the same quantity of specimens.

The cell consists of a Hardinge Conquest '42 CNC turning center, a CT36 Flow International Abrasive Waterjet Cutting System, a Dot Matrix Marking machine along with a digital retrofit on an existing Tinius Olsen Universal Test Machine with a DS/50 Data acquisition system for the Material Test Laboratory. The cell has displaced eight pieces of 40-year old equipment and integrated the new CNC tools to provide an optimum manufacturing operation.

The Material Test Laboratory is located in the same area as the cell and no longer manually computes and records the extensive data required by each individual ASTM test. This process is now automated through a data acquisition process and provides for automatic uploads of the test data to the factory host computer. In addition to the reduced process time, reductions in key punch time for manual data entry and production floor space use were realized.

What was intended to be a means for providing near net shape test specimens has now evolved into increased machine utilization of the waterjet machine. Currently, over 20 additional components ranging from ballistic steel to composite materials have been added to the cell. Each demonstrates significant manufacturing time reductions.

For more information see the Point of Contact for this survey.