So many advantages without an inch more

Halton Oy (Finland) installed an automatic line for pipes production manufactured by TTEngineering, which allowed the Finnish company to take a significant qualitative leap in terms of productivity. The plant replaces an old line and integrates a 1,500 W fibre laser calendering and welding machine switched with a 3D pipe cutting system, integrated in the plant. The resulting advantages are manifold.

Halton Oy is an important Finnish manufacturer of products for the air-conditioning, ventilation and airconveying industry; the company has been selling its products all over the world for 35 years, counting on a strategic trade policy focused on customer satisfaction with dedicated products and solutions, always considering technological innovation and flexibility as its trump cards. With this in mind the company has recently installed a fully automatic plant for pipes production manufactured by TTEngineering, replacing an old system based on the resistance welding technology and perfectly integrating an existing automatic machining unit.

Deeds, not words

TTEngineering’s Sales Director says: “The project originates from the customer’s idea to replace the old resistance welding pipe production line with a new and better performing one, based on sheet metal laser butt-welding technology”.

In comparison to its competitors the winning asset was certainly the “custom-cut solution” offered by the company from Como, which would allow the customer a considerably more favourable ROI. “That’s why we visited the customer even before starting with offers and layouts: we checked its needs and process modalities and only after that we proposed a solution that could meet the specifications required by the customer. Despite our offer far exceeded the customer’s budget (over 50%), we persuaded him with facts, since our solution would assure a remarkable increase of production efficiency and flexibility, as a direct consequence of reducing cycle time and machine setup time during item change, as well as eliminating intermediate processes and workings with the related equipment. Not to mention the reduction of warehouse stocks and raw materials handling costs, which results in energy saving. Moreover, our solution was largely preferred for its flexibility in terms of production range, assuring the possibility to manufacture not only round pipes but also rectangular and square sections, which are typical of the air-conditioning sector, adding an absolutely excellent aesthetic quality to the finished product”.

A qualitative leap

It would appear that so far Halton Oy had worked with a Jurassic machine; obviously, this is not true, but it is a fact that the purchase of this solution proposed by TTEngineering enabled the customer to reach and obtain what mentioned before without giving an inch of area compared to the previous system.

The other factor that finally persuaded Halton Oy was testing a similar system with their material directly at TTEngineering, watching how our programmers and mechanical engineers reconfigured anthropomorphic robots and equipments on existing plants in a short time, adjusting them perfectly according to their needs.

And if we also add a touch of Bel Paese to the reliability and technological innovation of TTE systems, maybe sipping a glass of fine wine in a typical restaurant on Lake Como, it’s a done deal!

The switched fibre laser welds and cuts

The plant is composed of a coil sheet metal cutting line integrated with a newly designed CSU 1000 model – automatic calendering and welding line; the welding laser source is 1,5000 W fibre “switched” for the pipe cutting system. Once the pipe is calendered with the Flexformer® system, it proceeds towards the fibre laser welding unit; at the end of the process the pipe is automatically picked up by a Fanuc robot (50 kg at wrist), which delivers it to the 3D cutting machine. All processes are carried out within the same automatic unit.

By means of a sophisticated vision system, the 3D cutting machine searches for the welded joint in order to perform perfectly aligned cuts; once the workpiece is cut according to the customer’s design, the robot picks it up by and places it on an already existing conveyor belt that moves it to a second pre-existing processing line that completes it.

With a cutting line able to process DX 54 and Inox 316 galvanized steel coils up to 1,000 mm wide and a thickness up to 1 mm, it is possible to cover big production lots without ever stopping the plant: we are talking about an annual amount of 650,000 finished products, which result in 3,600 working hours divided into two shifts with a 90% plant efficiency rate.

With the fibre laser technology, maintenance works both on welding and cutting units are almost entirely eliminated, assuring high quality standards and system reliability. Every time the pipe diameter and/or thickness changes, the customer does not need to perform any manual set up; in addition the change of the gas and fine dusts suction system installed on the 3D cutting machine (nozzle) is performed automatically by an anthropomorphic robot.

In the end, it is worthy to emphasize the importance of a factor that sometimes is taken for granted, but which should not be disregarded when speaking of a plant able to manufacture pipes with continual and sudden production changes. We are talking about the line management and programming software, which has been customized and produced by TTEngineering with sartorial mastery, just like a tailored suit. The software communicates directly with the customer’s management system to get information about items to be sent to production in a flexible and just-in-time way. Moreover, it is possible to have the two units working independently: this allows the customer to manufacture pipes addressed to other purposes while using the 3D pipe cutting machine manually to feed the other machining unit in the workshop.