Unison will be highlighting the breadth of productivity enhancing technology that it offers tubular parts manufacturers at the Southern Manufacturing exhibition. As a leading authority in intelligent tube and pipe bending technology, Unison supplies solutions to Tier One manufacturers worldwide. The company produces an extensive range of ‘all-electric’ tube bending machines, backed by an expanding portfolio of advanced software tools to help users accelerate the development of production-ready bending machine control programs.
The company's standard range of all-electric bending machines accommodates tube diameters from 16mm to 175mm. The company is continually pushing the performance boundary of this technology, most recently developing a custom machine that is capable of bending thick-walled tubing with a diameter of 225mm.
At the Southern Manufacturing exhibition, Unison will outline a new configuration of Breeze 30 all-electric tube bender developed for the aerospace industry. Capable of right-hand and left-handing bending, this machine features multi-stack tooling to accommodate the latest aerospace tube designs with short straights and tight bends down to 1D. It uses a sliding carriage arrangement with a fixed-position bend head to ensure highly accurate and repeatable parts with low setup time and minimal waste of material.
The company will also be highlighting a new version of its Evbend 1000 manual CNC tube bender, which incorporates a powerful HMI and controller software designed specifically for ease of integration with CAD systems and coordinate measuring machines (CMMs).
Visitors to Unison’s stand will be offered demonstrations of a number of powerful PC-based software tools. These will include the latest version of the 3D simulator, Opt2Sim, which helps users to accelerate development of production-ready control programs for bending machines. Capable of simulating any model from the company's Breeze range of all-electric bending machines, this software enables users to analyse, optimise and validate programs – without needing access to the physical machine. Based on a precision physics engine with an accuracy of just plus/minus 5 microns, it features comprehensive monitoring to guard against tube collision and uses artificial intelligence techniques to evaluate the optimum bending sequence.
The simulator automatically modifies the YBC bending data to create error-free programs and generates realistic real-time imagery that allows users to visualise the bending process in considerable detail. A high speed batch mode of operation, capable of validating around 100 bending programs an hour, is also available.
