Precision Part Design
Dentists use a drill to repair your teeth called the ‘hand piece’. The drill has a replaceable cartridge called a ‘turbine assembly’ where a variety of precision components spin a small cutting shaft called a bur. These hand piece drills run in the narrow spaces of the mouth and spin at 400,000 revolutions per minute, about 500 times faster than a car tire rotates at 100km/hr or 40 times faster than the kitchen blender. Prodrive Systems has revolutionized the dental turbine assembly design to provide better performance and an improved experience for dentists and patients providing better cutting speed, more control and could be used in the many existing dental hand pieces of differing styles and manufacturers. This required the design, analysis, testing and assembly of nanoscale components, some measuring a fraction of the diameter of a human hair.
What is Nanoscale Technology?
Nanoscale technology is a branch of nanotechnology where standard size milling and cutting tools are used to manufacture simple metal parts, structures and devices with dimensions smaller than 3mm.
How we did it?
Designing nanoscale components requires flawless precision and select manufacturers with computer controlled machines under strict calibration procedures. The design team used software tools that identify interference between parts measuring a few nanometers. Design 1st used ProEngineer and SolidWorks 3D mechanical design software for precise micro-scale assembly capabilities, which enable our designers and engineers to calculate weight within fractions of a milligram and perform simulation tests including FEA (Finite Element Analysis) stress and hi-speed rotation balancing for design verification. Additionally the team uses geometric dimensioning and tolerancing of the micro scale components to control machined parts with accuracy in the 10ths and 100ths of a thousandth of an inch, specifying procedures for product inspection to ensure performance consistency.
Design for Manufacturing (DFM)
When designing FDA controlled goods and medical parts with nanoscale dimensions, engineers have more on their plates than the difficult job of making sure the parts function as intended. They must also ensure that manufacturers of the tiny parts can machine, measure and achieve high production yield targets.
The goal for Design 1st was to design performance parts that assemble efficiently, are economically producible in volume, repeatable and highly reliable. This was accomplished through applying “design for manufacturing” techniques, whereby the design team accounted for the requirements and limitations of different manufacturing processes alongside selected global manufacturers in North America and Europe. While this proved challenging at times, persistence paid off and ProDrive Turbine Assembly is now in full volume production.
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