TPT July 2013

Bending, end forming and swaging

Complex manufacturing cells for heater spirals

IN air conditioning and heating technology, as well as in plant con- struction, spiral tube heat exchangers are on duty. The core for the production is one long tube part. Special requirements of tube processing include the precise and parallel bending of the two ends of the spiral or a frontal sealing surface, in addition to the thread seal. The specialists at transfluid have designed an intelligent automation system for heater spirals with lateral connection points for tubes with diameter from ½" to 1¼". In the fully automatic process, after the rolling process the robot puts the spirals into a special right/left mandrel bending machine. “This very special bending machine is able to bend the two ends of the spiral exactly parallel,” said Benedikt Hümmler, general manager of construction/production at transfluid. “In fact this is possible when the outgoing units are on the face side as well as when they are on the side. To get the necessary precision and process reliability, the robot puts the spiral at first in a measurement unit. Here the diameter of the spiral and the lengths

The manufacturing cell has a fast cycle time of 90 seconds for the whole process

After the installation this area will be sealed with an additional element. The solution is a robot with double gripper, which takes the spirals from the bending machine to the processing machine. The measurements that are determined before bending are used here again to ensure that the length and the angle of both ends of the spiral coil are identical. Afterwards, the tube ends are cut in an orbital chip-less cutting process, followed by a calibration process of the area where the thread and the frontal sealing surface are to be located. In the next step, the transfluid manufacturing cell cuts the threads and machines the frontal sealing surface. “The handling and the positioning of the spirals is very difficult and ambitious because on one side the spirals are quite instable, on other side they’re very heavy,” said Gerd Nöker, general manager of the sales department/ marketing of transfluid. transfluid will be exhibiting its tube solutions in hall 14 at EMO Hannover in September, on stand B45. transfluid Maschinenbau GmbH – Germany Fax: +49 2972 97 1511 Email: info@transfluid.de Website: www.tube-processing-machines.com

of the outgoing units are detected automatically and exactly.” The further processing of the ends also occurs in this machinery. A particular customer request for the manufacturing process was to also achieve a front-face sealing surface.

transfluid combines right/left bending with orbital and chip-less cutting for the production of heater spirals

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J uly 2013