Unison, a manufacturer of machines for tube bending with a direct support center in Asheville, North Carolina, has supplied two new all-electric tube bending machines to Ultibend Industries. The machines are intended to boost manufacturing productivity of stainless steel tube fittings for food and beverage processing systems. Customized to suit Ultibend’s proprietary manufacturing process, the machines from Unison automate the bending of tube fitting shapes such as elbows and U-bends, in sizes from 1/2 to 4 inches diameter. Initial manufacturing operations have demonstrated that the new machinery boosts manufacturing speed compared with the previous hydraulic bending process.
The main reason the Unison machines speed the bending is the inherently greater control of motion that’s possible inside Unison’s software-controlled, all-electric machine architecture. The software gearbox is able to control and coordinate several axes simultaneously for instance, avoiding the delays of a more mechanical machine such as the latency in response of a slave axis.