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For structural steel fabricators - the guys who cut, weld, shape and create girders, trusses and beams for office towers, industrial facilities, traffic tunnels, arenas - the definition in automation in recent years has been the CNC beam drill line. A beam drill line is a machine that uses a conveyor to move a piece of steel into position, then drills holes - specifically bolt holes - in several locations along the steel section, following the details provided in an engineering drawing of what the final section is supposed to look like.
The Computer-Numerical-Controlled (CNC) beam drill line can read the digital drawing file, determine where the holes belong, "probe" the beam using positioners, sensors and the drill head itself, then drill through the steel at very high speeds using hardened carbide drill bits and cooling fluids. The bolt holes are made in very little time and most of the labor is getting the drilled beams on and off the line and uploading the digital drawing into the machine's control system.
That's a quantum leap over the manual method, but there's one catch, and it's a pretty important one. THERE ARE USUALLY SEVERAL MORE FABRICATING OPERATIONS THAT NEED TO BE PERFORMED ON THE STEEL BEAM. Cutting different features (such as copes, notches, bevels) into the beam, trimming off the end of the steel piece to get it to the required length, and "scribing" different letters, numbers and other marks into the section are additional operations that must still be performed on many steel beams. None of these operations can be performed by a beam drill line.
Recently, a new approach to steel fabrication has come to the fabrication industry that performs hole drilling operation as quickly and as high-quality as the beam drill line, but performs a comparable level of automation to the many additional operations done to structural beams. The new method uses high-definition plasma cutting to thermally cut through or scribe the beam.
This technology is similar to the beam drill line in that the steel is transferred into the plasma torch vicinity, the digital file containing all the feature information is loaded into the plasma machine's software, and the plasma torch head probes the steel beam to determine (and remember) precisely where it's located and what all of its various features are. Then the plasma torch starts cutting bolt holes . . . and notches, copes, cutouts, bevel cuts, miter cuts . . . the full range of operations associated with structural steel fabrication.
These new generation plasma machines can do all these operations sequentially staring at one end of the beam and finishing at the other. When it's done, all the needed operations are finished - there's no need to transfer the finished beam to a downstream process. The plasma machines are kind of a "one stop shop" for fabricators.
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