Hainbuch has introduced carbon fibre to its work holding product range following the need to retain a slender and lightweight design and avoid unnecessary wall thickness and masses.
Using FEM calculations, the company has integrated carbon fibre into its product ranges and monitored performance under working conditions to ensure whether a clamping device is ideally loaded and balanced. It now relies on carbon fibre reinforced plastic (CFRP) as the basis for its new light weight generation of clamping devices. This manufacturing process sees CFRP embedded in a plastic matrix in multiple layers. The result is a high-strength composite material in which strength and rigidity in the fibre direction is much greater than it is transverse to the fibres.
Hainbuch's next generation of lightweight clamping devices have a static radial clamping force of up to 170kN.
The Hainbuch strategy of utilising CFRP reduces the weight of the clamping device by upward of 70% and therefore results in 30% faster spindle acceleration. This fast acceleration consequently permits productivity improvements for the end user. Additionally, a lightweight clamping device lowers the power consumption demands of a machine tool and the knock-on effect for the customer is reduced energy costs. These factors ensure that by acquiring this CFRP workholding system, energy-efficiency and environmental credentials will improve, the company believes.
Added to these factors, customers can increase process reliability through a reduced load on the machine components and also a more user friendly set-up solution. After all, your staff will be using lightweight clamping devices as opposed to cumbersome and heavy clamping systems. There is also the fact that lightweight clamping devices make a contribution to higher accuracy.
Hainbuch has calculated that customers will benefit from 30% faster spindle acceleration and higher RPM and productivity improvements by up to 6%. All this can be derived from using a workholding system that is up to 70% lighter than standard devices.
