David Aguirre CobosKelly RybaManufacturing Processes and Applications31 October 2018Computer-aided Manufacturing Computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) involves any manufacturing process that uses computer software to facilitate, “aid” or automate parts of the manufacturing process.
This process is subsequent from the computer-aided designing (CAD) process. Since CAM follows CAD, both are strongly associated with one another. That is why many new designing software now include the capabilities of CAD and CAM all in one program (Gould 32). Throughout the years, CAM has been proved particularly useful in the automotive and computer technology industries. However, CAM software has also been widely used in less obvious fields, including dentistry and textile manufacturing (Crelin 2).
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It has also been helpful in the creation of small, precision components in the medical field. The USGI Medical Inc. has proven CAM as a useful tool to create their specialized tool that is used during incisionless surgeries (“CAM Helps Medical Component Manufacturer Turn Ideas into Reality”). After designing an object using CAD software, a CAM program is used to manufacture the modeled object. The CAM program sets the toolpath of the manufacturing machines by using numerical control (CNC) (?ubo?ová 280). In CNC, instructions are transmitted to the manufacturing machine as a series of numbers known as G-code.
Those instructions tell the machine how to move and what actions to perform in order to form the object. The types of CNC machines used may include milling machines, drills, lathes, plasma lasers and even 3D printers (Crelin 3).
