Page 34 - MetalForming November 2015

Italian Metal-Fabricating
Next we took a look at what Prataviera calls a “hybrid” press devel- oped specifically for applications requiring high tonnage and small bed size.
“It’s really a C-frame press,” he says, “equipped with tie-rods to close the C and provide additional rigidity.”
Costam uses the hybrid press to stamp parts for high-end De’Longhi coffeemakers. “The parts have to be aesthetically perfect,” notes Graziano. Costam stamps some 60 parts for the coffeemakers, which then it assembles into approximately 400 machines/day on a dedicated assembly line.
A Look at State-of-the-Art Bend-Angle Control
We next visited the Prima Industrie bending-equipment facility, which manufactures approximately 100 press brakes/yr. in Cologna Veneta, near Venice. About one-third of the brakes travel across the ocean for U.S. instal- lation. The 5000-sq.-m plant and its 200 employees also manufacture approximately 50 panel benders per year, as well as automated bending cells. In fact, earlier this year Prima celebrated the manufacture of its 500th panel bender at the facility.
Welcoming Andy and I was Fabio Farina, press brake product manager, who in less than one year at the com-
pany already is announcing big tech- nology developments soon to come. Prima manufactures three models of servo-electric press brakes, and sales have grown consistently in recent years, Farina shares.
“Late this year and early into 2016, our family of press brakes will grow,” he says. “And, not only will we introduce new models, but new technology as well.” A tour of the manufacturing facil- ity revealed two press brakes on the floor dedicated to research-and-devel- opment projects, some of which Farina dared to share.
“We have three open projects under- way,” he explains: “Automatic crowning (not commonly found on servo-electric brakes); next-generation real-time bend-angle control, based on optical imaging; and robotic bending.”
Prima soon expects to add auto- matic crowning to its press brakes, Fari- na explains, for applications where fab- ricators must form parts to a bend radius exceeding the typical 8:1 ratio of die opening to material thickness.
Real-time bend-angle control with Prima press brakes comes via Lazer Safe technology, and that technology recently shot to a new level of per- formance with the introduction, in 2014, of Lazer Safe’s Iris product. The Iris (integrated real-time imaging sys- tem) optical setup collects and process-
es images in real time during bending and transfers the data to the press brake’s CNC. The control then digests the data to control bend speed and angle—active angle control for single parts or small batches, and dynamic angle control for high-speed processing of large lot sizes. It even permits, under certain conditions, according to litera- ture from Lazer Safe, bending beyond the speed restriction of 10 mm/sec. established by the European press- brake standard EN12622. Here, Iris looks at the angular velocity of the moving workpiece during bending so that when using a wider die opening a faster bending speed is allowed.
Lastly, Farina notes that the firm expects to see a boost in sales of robot- ic-bending cells, particularly where fabricators form large batches of parts of similar sizes. “We see increased use of robotic bending in Asia,” he adds, “despite the region’s lower labor costs.
“This is because production models there tend to be based more on mass production than in Europe or North America,” Farina continues, “where fab- ricators tend to run smaller batches and an increasing amount of product vari- ability.” R & D efforts in this arena, says Farina, are focused on developing tech- nology that more closely marries robot to press brake, to simplify integration and ease programming.
On to Laser Cutting— Advances Yielding 25-Percent Productivity Gains
Along with bending equipment, Prima also manufactures punching and shearing machines, laser-cutting machines and laser sources—CO2 and solid-state ND:Yag—as well as integrat- ed automated systems. And, it sells cut- ting systems equipped with fiber-laser sources. As nearly half of its overall busi- ness relates to the laser-cutting market, that’s where Andy and I focused our visit to the headquarters location of this €350- million corporation.
During our visit to Prima’s 350- employee facility in Torino, we learned of recent laser-machine design and development, as well as its applica-
Transmitter
Real-time bend-angle control with Prima press brakes comes via Lazer Safe technology, and that technology recently shot to a new level of performance with the introduction, in 2014, of Lazer Safe’s Iris product. The Iris (integrated real-time imaging system) opti- cal setup collects and processes images in real time during bending and transfers the data to the press brake’s CNC.
32 MetalForming/November 2015
www.metalformingmagazine.com