A combination of innovative design and sustainable new production techniques are responsible for the first stainless-steel electric scooter made by Swedish innovation company Stilride. With Semcon as its partner, the company is planning to challenge traditional manufacturing techniques and pave the way for new design by using robots to fold steel.

“Our ambition was to create the world’s most attractive, most sustainable electric scooter,” states Tue Beijer, industrial designer at Semcon and one of the founders of Stilride. “By using industrial robotic origami we can fold structures from a flat sheet of metal in completely new ways and create shapes true to the material’s characteristics and geometric nature.”
It all began as a Vinnova-funded research project, looking at how a new way of shaping steel could pave the way for new design and business opportunities. The first result of the project is the Stilride SUS1 electric scooter, which is now available to purchase. This powered scooter has a novel design, innovative technical features, durable, efficient batteries, and a powerful electric motor.

“The environmental footprint of the production process for this product is minimal, while our ‘Light.Fold’ production technology makes for flexible manufacture,” says Beijer. “In addition, stainless steel can be recycled, and it offers long service life.”

Semcon’s responsibilities in the venture involved CAD, mechanical engineering and project management. The business community and academia will now further examine the advanced production method devised for the project.

For further information
www.semcon.com

The new LVD Ulti-Form follows on from LVD’s Dyna-Cell robotic bending cell and takes bending technology a step further by incorporating an automated tool-changing press brake. This configuration serves to keep bending productivity at its peak, handling both small batches and long production runs efficiently with minimal changeover time. In short, Ulti-Form delivers high productivity bending with unattended operation.

LVD’s Ulti-Form features a 135-tonne press brake designed using the ToolCell platform, the company’s automated tool-changing press brake, integrated with an industrial robot. The press brake houses a built-in tooling warehouse and uses a gripper mechanism in the machine’s back-gauge fingers to quickly change tools. As the robot picks the first workpiece from the input stack and centres it, the press brake completes the tool change. Ulti-Form handles parts from 50 x 100 mm up to 1200 x 800 mm, weighing up to 25 kg.

Programming of both the press brake and robot is handled offline and no robot teaching is required. CADMAN-B software automatically calculates the optimal bend program. The robot software imports the bending data and automatically calculates all gripper positions, taking into account gripper force, collision detection and robot reach.

LVD’s Ulti-Form robot gripper is a patent-pending, auto-adapting design. The gripper has the flexibility to accommodate a number of part geometries, automatically adjusting to workpiece size. This attribute allows the processing of different component geometries without the need for a gripper change, keeping production continuous and uninterrupted.

Ulti-Form is also equipped with LVD’s Easy-Form Laser-adaptive bending system.

For further information
www.lvdgroup.com

Tube manipulation and pipe-bending subcontract business, T&T Tubecraft, has taken delivery of a new all-electric 130 mm diameter multi-stack CNC tube-bending machine from tube manipulation technology specialist, Unison. The machine is the third Unison tube bender to arrive at T&T Tubecraft, where it joins a 50 mm Unison Breeze machine and a 100 mm Unison Breeze multi-stack model that are in daily use at the company’s Woking-based facility.

“Of all our tube benders, the 100 mm Unison machine is easily the busiest,” says T&T Tubecraft managing director Ross Turner. “This is largely down to its user-friendly programming, fast tool changes, automatic set up, and uncompromising levels of accuracy and repeatability. Ironically, when we purchased the 100 mm Unison machine back in 2015, we didn’t have a vast amount of work for it. This quickly changed, however, as we gained the ability to take on new projects. The new 130 mm machine will increase our capability even further, both in terms of capacity and the ability to tender for an even greater range of projects. We expect it to be of particular interest to customers in the aerospace sector.”

The bigger brother of the Unison 100 mm multi-stack machine, the Unison 130 mm tube bender is particularly suited to exotic alloys such as titanium and Inconel, as well as Super-Duplex stainless steels. Able to push-bend tubes of up to 6.2 m in length when in standard mode, the machine also features a hitch-feed facility, whereby the carriage retracts by the length of the next feed, enabling the mandrel bending of tubes of up to 8.7 m long. As a result of this capability, T&T Tubecraft believes that, out of all UK tube manipulation subcontractors, it may provide the longest bending range.

For further information
www.unisonltd.com