Autor: Reimund Neugebauer

Within the last few years there was a growing trend at universities to establish so called Virtual Reality laboratories as special work places. This trend follows the need for better visualisation, both of research findings and of teaching content. The use of Virtual Reality systems for educational purposes at universities improves the imparting of complex issues and therefore enables a faster and more purposeful expert education. The visualisation of the relevant teaching content, using the virtual-interactive environment in combination with practical training, will help to improve the training results [1]. This paper outlines the potentials of the Virtual Reality technology for the university education.

Rising demands for productivity and precision are leading to new machine concepts and processing strategies for tool machines. To meet the new request of these technologies all involved sub-systems must be taken into account for the development, also the clamping jig, which was neglected badly during the past. So one part of the research project “MaschinenbauInitiative Next Economy” was the development of a hydraulic clamping jig for dry milling processes, which can be integrated into compensation concepts of tool machines very easily. As a result, the demonstrator can hand over data of temperatures, positions and forces to the PLC without need of an excessive amount of additional hard and software.

Virtual Reality methods will open new ways for generating a virtual machine tool in the near future. Based on the experience gained in the development of prototypes, a virtual development platform for machine tools with parallel kinematics is striven for. Based on such a complex engineering solution, the assessment of, for example, the redundancy and size of the workspace as well as collision aspects and the avoidance of both singularities and certain mechanical characteristics of the construction will be fundamentally simplified. This, in turn, will ensure shorter iteration cycles in the development of an optimal machine structure and forms the basis for test operations within the virtual production process. The development process for machine tools with parallel kinematics will thus no longer be of a linear nature, but will be defined as an overall process in the form of concurrent engineering.

Growing requirements concerning comfort, safety, functionality and design are leading to fundamental changes in car body manufacturing, where as the demands for lightweight construction are clearly playing a central role. The expanding use of lightweight materials, including innovative semi-finished products, continually increases the level of difficulty required in forming operations and this, in turn, is leading to the inevitable development of new technologies. Based on this, some of the most significant trends in car body manufacturing will be covered.