Gibbs Makes Second Grant of Software and Services to Purdue University

By DE Editors

Gibbs and Associates, developer of GibbsCAM software for programming CNC machine tools, has granted Purdue University’s College of Engineering 60 seats of its GibbsCAM software to run on the university’s Engineering College Network at the West Lafayette, IN, campus. 

The College of Engineering, where nearly 7,000 undergraduate and almost 2,500 graduate students are pursuing technical degrees, is comprised of 12 schools. With this grant, GibbsCAM software now supports computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) within the School of Engineering Education’s Artisan and Fabrication Laboratory (AFL).  The AFL is part of the Ideas to Innovation (i2i) Learning Laboratory, which annually prepares nearly 2,000 first-year engineering students for professional programs and industry. The laboratory takes students through all the stages of the design cycle: identifying design criteria to solve a problem; finding potential alternatives; planning for the chosen solution; building and testing a prototype; evaluation; and refining the solution, all within a safe, supervised environment.

“We are grateful to Gibbs for their donation of GibbsCAM software,” says Eric Holloway, director of Instructional Laboratories at the School of Engineering Education. “We encourage our engineering students to use the labs to do as much as possible, on their own, to create parts or assemblies they may require for engineering projects.  The ease of learning and using GibbsCAM will help us teach students the machining aspects of manufacturing, while providing them an easy method to access CAD data from CATIA and our other CAD systems, and then generate and postprocess programs for all of our machine tools, from 2-axis lathes to 5-axis machining centers.”

The grant, excluding training services recently provided by Gibbs, is valued at $635,625, and includes modules for 3-axis milling, rotary milling, lathe turning, 5-axis milling and turning, and machine tool simulation; ACIS and STEP readers; CATIA and UG/NX (Siemens) translators; and software maintenance. It also includes postprocessors for the various machine tools within Purdue’s College of Engineering. 

For more information, visit Gibbs and Associates.

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company's website.