Composites Europe — Machine trends for composites processing

Composites Europe: 19. – 21 September 2017, Stuttgart (Germany)

In the spir­it of ‘clamp­ing with ice’

Com­pos­ites Europe, the lead­ing inter­na­tion­al trade fair for fibre com­pos­ite tech­nol­o­gy, will once again be the show­case for inno­v­a­tive tech­nolo­gies and the meet­ing place for spe­cial­ists from all over the world in 2017. This year we are pre­sent­ing ‘clamp­ing with ice’ for the sec­ond time, and not because we are run­ning out of ideas, but because inter­est in this tech­nol­o­gy is grow­ing more and more.

Con­ven­tion­al clamp­ing tech­nol­o­gy reach­es its lim­its when com­po­nents are too small or too thin or, for exam­ple, have an air-per­me­able mate­r­i­al com­po­si­tion. Clamp­ing with ice, on the oth­er hand, is a fas­ten­ing tech­nol­o­gy that makes it pos­si­ble to clamp even work­pieces made of dif­fi­cult mate­ri­als or geome­tries. Con­ven­tion­al tech­niques fail, for exam­ple in the pro­duc­tion and pro­cess­ing of plates made of sin­tered mate­ri­als, because these plates can­not be clamped with vac­u­um with­out dis­tor­tion. The same applies to air-per­me­able mate­ri­als such as paper or plas­tic hon­ey­combs or porous alu­mini­um sponges, which are used in the air­craft sup­ply indus­try, in rail vehi­cle con­struc­tion and in truck bod­ies. The size of the com­po­nents also quick­ly leads to the lim­its of fea­si­bil­i­ty. In med­i­cine, in the pro­duc­tion of implants or in microsys­tems tech­nol­o­gy, the small­est com­po­nents are need­ed that have to be machined with pin­point accuracy.

Using the sys­tem on a CNC machin­ing cen­tre is uncom­pli­cat­ed: Dur­ing clamp­ing, the work­pieces are frozen secure­ly and absolute­ly stress-free on a Kry­otool clamp­ing plate by means of water. The plate itself is held on the machine like a work­piece with con­ven­tion­al fas­ten­ing ele­ments. This means that the same high clamp­ing force acts on the entire con­tact surface.

Com­po­nents that have, for exam­ple, free-form sur­faces or low mechan­i­cal sta­bil­i­ty are frozen in a recess in the clamp­ing plate and can thus be fixed in any machin­ing plane. With­out time-con­sum­ing reclamp­ing, 5‑sided milling, grind­ing or pol­ish­ing can be car­ried out in a sin­gle oper­a­tion. The pow­er­ful auto­mat­ic defrost­ing sys­tem ensures that the work­piece is quick­ly released after the machin­ing process.

Numer­ous users from a wide range of indus­tries work with this tech­nol­o­gy on our CNC machin­ing cen­tres. We will be hap­py to present suc­cess­ful solu­tions to you in detail. You will find us in Hall 4 / Stand A29