Tube bending cell

Unison has developed a bending cell for tube and pipe manufacturer RathGibson at its Wisconsin facility to serve growing demand for Ushaped heat exchanger components.

A version of Unison's servomotorbased tube bending machine uses a roll-forming tool to create customradius tubular parts under software control, eliminating much of the tooling and set-up time previously required. The automatic bending cell is linked to the tube manufacturing process. At the start of the cell is a saw and infeed conveyor. Once a U shape part is programmed or selected from a database of designs, the control program computes the length of tube required and issues a command to the saw. Cut tube is fed into the cell's conveyor system, and accurately positioned for bending with the aid of laser reflection sensors.