Composite

Increasing competition within the Aeronautical and automotive sectors are making composite materials a pivotal factor and so it is driving many manufacturers to reduce the number of rejects, deal with quality control demands, consume less energy and increase production levels.

But creating composite materials require an extremely accurate combination of pressure and temperature. The large thermal inertias in the moulds, the unevenness of the parts and the exothermic nature of the materials introduce delays and significant dynamic changes in temperatures.

Although industrial equipment, conventional control systems and human knowledge have improved constantly, current methods impose limitations on performance. This leads to frequent recourse to manual intervention in the heating and curing cycles giving rise to large temperature deviations.

As a result, there are two expensive consequences:

• The total time from the start of the curing cycle up to the completion of the 90-minute curing process takes typically +300 minutes.
• There is a percentage of pieces that are not compliant with demanding curing requisites and are rejected.

ADEX Technology has been applied successfully to the thermal curing process of composite materials. With ADEX, the cycles are under automatic control at all times resulting in:

1. 1. Precise and uniform thermal profiles, eliminating any rejection of pieces
2. 2. Minimising energy consumption, accelerating the payback of the ADEX platform.
3. 3. Reducing the need of human intervention during the process and post-processing rejected pieces.
4. 4. And drastically reducing the cycle times, which enables the increase of pieces produced per day.

ADEX technology has been productize for RTM self heating moulds and moulds heated within hot plate presses and just requires customization for each plant.

We can apply it to autoclaves and stoves as an on-demand engineering project.