Your products benefit from preforming with Fiber Patch Placement on various levels: Your component benefits from an optimized fiber architecture and your time for product development is shortened with an efficient process and software. And, of course, your production costs are reduced by full automation, maximum material efficiency and minimal scrap.
Advantages that convince you and your customers!
Patch-based laminates make your component not only better, but also lighter. The optimal alignment of the fiber patches along load paths in the component increases mechanical properties such as strength and stiffness by up to 150% compared to a conventional laminates. In addition, you can realize variable laminate thicknesses for your component. This allows you to easily build different variations of your components for different application loads and save expensive carbon fiber at the same time.
Another highlight for your products: unique and customizable optics. Depending on the fiber orientation, the surface reflects incident light in different directions. You can use this effect on visible parts of your component and arrange patches in individual patterns. This creates a unique look which increases the value of the products, especially in the consumer and luxury space. The fiber patches offer endless design possibilities for your component, ensuring you can set yourself apart from the competition with an individual appearance.
The robot-assisted Fiber Patch Placement shortens process times for complex components significantly, effectively increasing your production capacity. Additionally, material costs are lowered by near-net-shape preforming with scarp rate as little as 5 – 10% for most components. Individual reinforcements are manufactured completely without waste – every single fiber is put to use. Many process steps that are indispensable in conventional processing – such as cutting fiber fabrics and forming, are not necessary when producing with Fiber Patch Placement. The quality of the manufactured components is consistently high – regardless of when and how many parts you manufacture. The SAMBA product protocol of seamlessly documents the quality of each part produced.
The end-to-end automation increases your not only your capacity and reduces the workload for employees, but also boots your process efficiency. Preforms can be detached and moved to the next processing step fully automated with an additional robot. SAMBA seamlessly integrates into industrial production environments. This enables production quantities of above 50,000 components (depending on the product) for one production system per year. The small space requirement of a single production cell makes the process extremely flexible and easily expandable if required.
If your challenge are frequent product changes when producing medium batch quantities, look forward to extremely short retooling times: Form tools are easily replaced via quick-release. Production immediately continues after loading a new production program.
ARTIST STUDIO lets you benefit from a comprehensive, virtual development environment from CAD to machine data on a single software platform. This speeds up your development time, as the software automatically generates optimized patch laminates, immediately followed by the creation of the corresponding machine data for SAMBA. ARTIST STUDIO has been created by composite developers for composite developers, featuring an intuitive program logic and user-friendly interface, enabling quick and easy changes to the laminate structure. Changes in the laminate are automatically carried over to the machine data – leading to a further reduction of your development time. The integrated visual process simulation with built-in collision detection simulates all robot movements virtually before production start – this increases not only production safety, but again shortens development time and production preparation.
“Our tests proved exactly what we expected from the Cevotec technology,” says Dirk Hanel, product manager at North Kiteboarding, “We can quickly adjust the patch design in an easy way, in order to change the stiffness in certain areas of the board, for example,” Hanel explains. “Or we can work on details until we get the results we want, without redesigning the whole board. With traditional materials this would not be possible.”
You got questions? Contact one of our specialists for an individual consultation.
Your personal consultant:
Thorsten Groene
Managing Director
+49 89 2314 165 51
thorsten.groene [@] cevotec.com
Your technical experts:
Felix Michl
Chief Technology Officer
+49 89 2314 165 11
felix.michl [@] cevotec.com
Dr. Neven Majic
Executive Vice President
Software Technology
+49 89 2314 165 31
neven.majic [@] cevotec.com
