TPT November 2012

Technology News

Accurate tube bending IN times when tubes were manually bent on hand operated tube benders, tube bending was considered an art. The tube artists always knew about the hidden “causes of defect” because the fitting accuracy was and is still a question of interaction between the material and its variable criteria, such as temperature, weight, transportation, diameter, wall thickness, etc and the references to the centreline including the coordinates of the A and B ends in relation to the bend angle, radius and rotation, all of which ended up in the tolerance envelope. of tube bending a new international definition. It is often the odds and ends of everyday work which make a worker’s life considerably easier. A banal innovation in the software thus becomes a sensation. It is like the Olympics, with the motto “Inspire a generation where hundredths of a second or a millimetre decides a win or loss”. Or like a buffet built up of lots of tiny fancy foods, TeZetCAD is made up of sophisticated modules which are demanded from the continuously developed tube market.

measuring points may be four or six, with bend angles and deviations which are well cognisable you need perhaps only two measuring points, to stay in the pre-defined tolerance envelope. Many companies work with the so called “planning process versions”. The operators pre-process the bending data for the different bending machines, work without using measuring machines. But sometimes it would help if they could measure with a measuring machine in order to optimise the process. TeZetCAD’s new function, called “Virtual Measurement”, introduced it to the market and offered once again a worldwide innovation. With the virtual measurement the measuring arm is replaced by the mouse. Instead of the well known measurement-sound to confirm the recorded xyz point, the user hears the mouse click.

Each person uses a different measuring technique using a different number of measuring points, so that when a tube needs to be re-measured by a different person due to a shift change, holidays or illness, differences between the repeated measurements occur, especially because of the bent tube geometries and their “own life”. The measuring plan defines the number of measuring points per cylinder and per bend radius, for example for weak bend angles and/or deviations the number of

Almost every technological progress is directed towards productivity, time saving and industrial automation; innovation, however, always comes into play when nobody expects it. New market niches appear at times when no one expects it. Niches spotted by specialists who turned the idea into a new module with the potential to stir up the market. As for example TeZetCAD, the tube specialised software, state-of-the-art world market leader that gave the art

TeZet Technik AG – Switzerland Email: leistritz@tezet.com Website: www.tezet.com

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N ovember 2012