The system is at the disposal of FPC's industrial partners as well as all interested companies to develop automated CFRP production processes on the basis of the Fiber Patch Placement (FPP) technology.
“Already when Cevotec officially joined the FPC at JEC World 2019, it was clear that a Fiber Patch Placement (FPP) system will be installed in the FPC to provide our partners and customers with a complete portfolio of the latest technologies and developments for the next generation of composite manufacturing,” says Hannah Paulus, head of Fiber Placement Center at SGL Carbon. “The new SAMBA Pro Prepreg System from Cevotec offers many advantages for the production of complex shaped components with short cycle times”. Cevotec, together with its partner Baumann Automation, have commissioned the SAMBA Pro Prepreg production cell in Meitingen since November 2020. It is now ready for operation and the first application development projects have already been started.
The SAMBA Pro Prepreg system in Meitingen is an advancement of the FPP system presented in 2017 at the JEC World in Paris.
“In order to ensure maximum flexibility in terms of geometry and patch edges, a laser cutting unit was installed also in this system,” reported Felix Michl, CTO of Cevotec. “The entire material feed is temperature-controlled, so that the pre-impregnated materials can be processed in a controlled environment.” The robots in the system are the well-known and proven pair of TP80 pick-and-place robot and the TX200 tool manipulator from Stäubli. “This configuration enables us to ensure a high lay-up frequency combined with a very high positioning accuracy, allowing for a fully automated lay-up of complex geometries of medium to small dimensions,” explains Michl.
In addition, the vision system, the machine vision quality control system for material quality and placement accuracy, has been fundamentally revised by Cevotec and now offers extended set-up options to adapt the system to different materials.
Prior to the installation of the system, SGL Carbon also entered into a development partnership with Cevotec. The aim is to develop innovative applications based on SGL TowPreg and using the SAMBA systems.
