15m Industrial Plasma Cutter

Hello,

I'm new to this forum.

I am an engineering student doing an internship at an industrial boiler manufacturing company.
I have been asked to design and manufacture (from scratch) a 15m industrial CNC plasma cutter, cutting ~10mm Aluzinc used to clad boilers.

The design doesn't necessarily need to be as precise or fast as a commercial industrial CNC plasma cutter, however I am trying to keep the cost below £10,000 ($12,210). All welding etc. can be done in house.

I had the idea of using a cheap desktop to run LinuxCNC and program the automation of importing G code from CAD models, but I was hoping to get some advice from people with more experience in this area.

Is LinuxCNC suitable for an application like this?

Many thanks in advance.

Absolutely LinuxCNC is suitable, _BUT_
I think the mechanics/cost/design issues of a 15M table are
going to be the problem not the controller choice...

I think that a bicycle chain Core-XY might be one way to do this, just because you can easily join bicycle chains end-to-end.
Rack and pinion also scales fairly easily.

I don't know if anyone has done a plasma "Skycam" yet, but that might work rather well with THC.

The latter idea is really growing on me

You used £, where are you doing this?

According to his IP he is in UK.
That is doable for sure, but you have to carefully follow some guidelines.
There is a lot of info on several threads here to give you an idea what you are dealing with, and anything above 3 meters is basically add more metal, more rails ( very hard to align properly as the max length is 6 meters ), more rack for the pinion ( easy to add length, they usually come in 2 meter lengths ), and more cable. The rest stays pretty much the same.
There is a big difference on the actual cutting table, it has to carry a lot of weight so there is no skimping there.
What's the width ?
Do you have any means of doing some technical drawings and post them here, that will save you a lot of everything as plenty of us have a lot of experience with it.

what is the expected precision

the length is 15m i cand find the table width to go
we use a I30:1 precision gear on a 8meter Table that gantry never failed in BEND order
cost is 180Euros per gear but its the real deal

you can go easy at 30meter with the T10 Rack pinion
at about 0,2mm precision

72Volts 8Nm steppers

Thank you all for getting back to me.

You are correct, I am in the UK.
I am sourcing parts to build a model at the moment. Here are a few more details about the design:

My intent was to use servo motors given the size of the operation, connect to LinuxCNC via parallel port and use a two axis rack and pinion setup.

There are only two thicknesses of material the machine will be cutting so I was thinking along the lines of some kind of manual z axis control with no THC.

I don't have an exact scope with regard to precision, I would say less than a millimeter, the quality of finish and precision are not of paramount importance as the joints are overlapped and holes for gauges are patched when the cladding is applied (the material is wrapped around the boilers). At the moment the material is being plasma cut by hand so any CNC will be an improvement with regard to precision.

The maximum width is 1.25m with a maximum length of just under 15m.

It is potentially possible to build one of reduced length, the Aluzinc is kept in a roll and pulled out by hand so could theoretically be rolled out in stages, how much easier would this make the build?

I am trying to keep the design simple and get to a manufacturing stage within a few weeks.

Thanks again.