TUBE NEWS TN November 2017 | Page 16

FABTECH 2017: Tube bending and cutting in one step Fully automatic solution from transfluid for efficient exhaust manifold production Streamline operations are particularly required in such cases, in which a product cannot be installed until several components are available. This was the reason why in a recent project, transfluid developed a system solution for the efficient production of a complete exhaust manifold made of 4 or 6 different stainless steel tubes. 16 TUBE NEWS EVENTS November 2017 For this purpose, a 6-meter long tube is first loaded onto the tube-bending machine. Each individual tube is fitted with up to 4 bends. After the bending process, the tube is cut, chip-free, on the bending machine directly using a blade cutting process and is then inserted by robot into the corresponding forming machine. It forms an asymmetric geometry, which fits each individual bend progression. After processing, the components are then fed directly into a welding cell. It welds the tubes to flanges. This way, one complete module is always available as a unit.