The installation of a all-electric tube bending machine is helping Senior Aerospace SSP to reduce cycle-time and improve efficiencies for fabricating aircraft duct components with complex shapes. Tubular parts with multiple bends are now fabricated in a single machine stage, eliminating a manually-controlled hydraulic bending process that could take a week or more.
Senior Aerospace SSP makes ducting components for many of the world's leading aircraft manufacturers, for applications such as engine exhaust gas recirculation, de-icing systems, and air conditioning. Several tubing parts are fabricated in small batches from materials such as 625 and 718 Inconel, and titanium.
Due to the space restrictions on aircraft, parts often have complex three-dimensional shapes with closely-spaced bends.
Fabricating these using Senior Aerospace SSP's manually-controlled hydraulic bending machinery typically involved a start-stop process, with bends made one at a time. This involved fitting the tooling and setting the machine up for each bend. Bent parts would then be sent off for cleaning, and the exercise repeated for the next bend one or more days later. So for parts with three or four bends, a complete fabrication cycle could often last a week or more.
To improve productivity, Senior Aerospace SSP invested in an all-electric tube bending machine from Unison, for tubing sizes up to 4 inches/100 mm diameter. The bending axes on the Unison all-electric tube bending machine are based on software-controlled servomotors. Tool settings for tube parts are stored in software, allowing the machine to be set up and a complete sequence of bends to be made in a single continuous process.
Several of the parts being made have such closely spaced bends that the machine is programmed to accommodate specially-designed compound tooling that grips the previous bend, because the straight sections between bends are too short for conventional clamping tools.
The Unison all-electric tube bending machine also has the ability to stack as many as four bending tools at once onto the bending head. This saves considerable set-up time by allowing a variety of jobs to be run without having to make a new set-up.
Tubing parts with multiple bends, which are typically fabricated in small batches of up to 20 with production cycle times ranging from several days to two weeks - are now almost invariably produced in a single shift. Unlike the previous manually controlled bending process, these batches are also typically produced without any scrap, as the machine's closed-loop control maintains axis settings to a fine resolution, regardless of variations in operating conditions such as temperature.
"The Unison machine has allowed us to trim days off the normal fabrication times for many of the complex tubing parts we produce, as well as eliminating intermediate cleaning processes," says Thomas Marshall, Manufacturing Engineer at Senior Aerospace SSP in Burbank.
"It's playing a valuable role in improving the productivity and flexibility of one of our key component production processes.”