The Application of CNC Technology in Industry 2024

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The CNC technology has made remarkable strides across many industries and is considered the best way to manufacture parts needed for certain machines.

With that said, the application of CNC tech goes across all scales of business; starting from the smaller companies to the big giants. It’s safe to say that we couldn’t have imagined a world today without CNC machines having a say in it.

If your business happened to be revolving around manufacturing, then you should know what these machines are, what they’re capable of, and how the technology behind it works.

Since parts can be easily manufactured by these machines, it’s important that we discuss the industries where this technology has its biggest use.

With all that said, CNC technology will grow exponentially in use due to the core mechanics of which it’s based. This has caused a lot of demand for personnel that know how to operate them, which has resulted in a lot of schools opening just to teach how to use.

Now, let’s discuss the fields that have the biggest application of CNC technology.

The Metal Industry

By far the industry where CNC sees the most involvement is the metal industry. This industry is so wide that it’s hard to pinpoint the fields that don’t use it.

1. Removing Metal

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The field that has the most use, however, is the field that specializes in removing metal from raw materials. As you’d imagine, some of the biggest industries that have emerged from this field are the automotive industry.

The parts that are mostly created for the sake of automobiles include gears, shafts, and various other parts that make up the rest of your average vehicle.

With the emergence of CNC technology, a person can create these parts all through a centralized center that oversees all the machines involved in the making of parts.

Some of the machines that were initially and traditionally used to create parts are the reamer, shaping machine, drilling, lathe, milling, etc. Nowadays, all of these have their very own CNC counterpart that allows greater versatility, faster operating and more desirable outcomes.

It’s safe to say that these machines are numerous and vary in specialization, with each designed to do one or more jobs.

2. Fabricating Metal

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CNC technology is used extensively for fabricating metal. One of the most common means where these machines operate in this field of the metal industry is on steel plates.

Steel plates are used in all aspects of life. Almost everything that’s on a larger scale uses steel plates. CNC machines operate on these plates by shearing, cutting, foaming, or welding the plate.

Then, the plate can be distributed towards various industries that have particular use of that plate. The machines that are mostly used for these tasks are your plasma or laser CNC cutters.

Either can be used to cut or make holes in the plates, depending on which the manufacturer needs, and the CNC press can bend it or shape to give it the final form.

As you can imagine, multiple machines can be used in accordance with one another to work simultaneously through a centralized center that is being overseen by an operator.

After the process is finished, the result is a fully modified steel plate that can be shipped towards various industries that need it.

The application of such machines has created an industry that focuses solely on manufacturing them. As you can imagine, there are dozens of these machines each one used for a particular job. If you’re in the manufacturing industry and are looking for a CNC seller, then make sure to visit elephant-cnc.com

3. Electrical Discharge Machining

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Electrical discharge machining, shortly known as EDM, focuses solely on removing metal from raw materials, the same as the first one we mentioned, but it does it through different means.

The EDM industry removes metal from material by creating a spark that burns and melts the metal, making it in liquid form.

For this task, we have the helping hand of the Vertical EDM and the Wire EDM, which both operate on the principle of CNC automation. Both of these machines operate differently. The first one, Vertical EDM, requires a specialized electrode to be made in the same form and size of which the cavity is needed to melt the metal. On the other hand, the Wire EDM machines use another method that focuses on die combinations for the dies that require the fabrication based on the specific industry.

Electronics Industry

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You’ be surprised that CNC machines don’t solely specialize in working with metal; they can be used to manufacture electronics parts.

CNC machines are heavily used in manufacturing motherboards for personal computers and various other devices such as tablets and smartphones.

Their application is so heavily used because of the attention to precision and detail that motherboards require. Furthermore, each motherboard is made out of thousands of tiny parts that CNC assembly. If there was no technology to assemble these parts, we’d argue we wouldn’t have computers advanced the same way we have today.

Medical Industry

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And the last, but not the least is the medical industry. Every field of medicine that requires CNC heavily relies on customization. This is because every patient is different from the rest and every part must be manufactured based on their needs.

As with the previous one, the level of precision and detail are the reasons why this technology has its use in the medical field. You’d be surprised to see the number of parts that are created for the purpose of the medical field.

Here is an example of some of them:

  • Various types of implants
  • Various orthotic devices
  • EMD devices
  • Electronic devices solely for the purpose of patient monitoring
  • Research equipment
  • MRI machines
  • Medical instruments
  • Plastic, metal, and rubber parts for both patients and medical personnel
  • Safety packagings for medical equipment that preserve the equipment’s sterility
  • Many more

If we talk about the many parts that this technology creates for the medical industry, we’d need a whole article on its own. What’s important to know is that we have great use of CNC throughout all aspects of life and across hundred of industries.