Prof. John Mo
(Fellow of IME and IEA)
Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Australia

John P. T. Mo is Professor of Manufacturing Engineering since 2006. He was Head of Manufacturing and Materials Engineering at RMIT University, Australia between 2006 and 2014. During his headship, his department has over 40 staff and research fellows with over 500 students from undergraduate to PhD levels. John has been an active researcher in manufacturing and complex systems for over 40 years and worked for educational and scientific institutions in Australia and Hong Kong. From 1996, John was a Project Manager and Research Team Leader with Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) for 11 years leading a team of 15 research scientists working on high value industrial projects. A few highlights of the projects that John led in CSIRO and in RMIT included: signal diagnostics for plasma cutting machines, ANZAC ship alliance engineering analysis, optimisation of titanium machining for aerospace industry, critical infrastructure protection modelling and analysis, polycrystalline diamond cutting tools on multi-axes CNC machine, system analysis for support of complex engineering systems, national Electronic Product Code demonstrator (for Australia). John has been academic advisor for several educational institutions in the Australasian region on their engineering program development and operations. John obtained his doctorate from Loughborough University, UK and is a Fellow of Institution of Mechanical Engineers (UK) and Institution of Engineers Australia.
Speech Title: Sustainable Cutting of Hard-to-Cut Materials
Abstract: Hard-to-cut materials are metallic materials such as titanium alloys, tungsten carbide, polycrystalline diamond, cubic boron nitride, with properties of high hardness, high strength, thermal adhesion, chemically reactive. These properties render traditional subtractive manufacturing methods such as cutting, milling, grinding difficult to process. A non-traditional machining method "electric discharge machining" has been commonly used for shaping core of moulds and dies, and is restricted on three-axes machining centres. Unfortunately, traditional CNC machining often removes 95% of the raw materials, which not only causes significant material wastage, but also wastes lots of machining power (energy). Furthermore, starting with the developing of an electric discharge grinding machine, research into the fundamental scientific principles has generated a series of electric discharge control theories which are then applied to other forms of manufacturing platforms. One of the platforms is to mount the electric discharge tool to robots. This paper reviews the scientific principles and development pathways of a new electric discharge cutting tool on robots. Compared to CNC machine tools, multi-axes robots suffer from significant vibration and instability if they are required to do machining of metals, due to high forces during cutting and their relatively weak structure. Research has shown that while CNC machines often have stiffness greater than 50 N/μm, robots usually have less than 1 N/μm. On the other hand, due to the IRs' high degrees of freedom, they can perform machining trajectories in ample 3-dimensional space while keeping an arbitrary position and orientation for any cutting tool.
Combining the best characteristics of electric discharge cutting and versatile robot arm trajectories, the new electric discharge cutting tool is capable of preserving raw materials offcuts for other uses. This development sparks a new line of research into integrating electric discharge machining process with robots' spatial flexibility while the system does not create any contacting forces hence producing accurately machined parts more sustainably.