4900 Calvert St.DALLAS TX 75247
4900 Calvert St.DALLAS TX 75247
SMART Solutions
Industry 4.0
Today, the composite parts manufacturing industry is constantly challenged to produce ever larger volumes at ever lower costs. It also faces four major challenges in its production processes: raw material costs, carbon footprint, reliability and labor costs.
At CAC, our expertise is to bring innovations to reach your goals. These SMART solutions have been created to optimize your production by reducing cycle time, increasing quality and repeatability and improving the work environment: this is the key to optimization.
All SMART solutions are supervised by a single MES (Manufacturing Execution System): SMART Pilot, which ensures perfect interoperability between SMART solutions.
SMART Control is an automatic control solution to check in real time the conformity of the lay-up to the theoretical plan. It consists of a camera system with its lighting and plug & play software that allows control functions such as shape identification and recognition, fiber orientation control, ply positioning, gap and/or overlap detection as well as FOD and defect detection on composite materials.
•Ply identification without laser nor barcode
•Quality inspection of plies during lay-up (shape, positioning,…)
•Accuracy (± 0.2 mm) and reliability
•Suitable for Pick & Place robotic arm or other system (3 axis,…)
•Fully modular system (plug & play software + camera system)
•Replaces the presence of a quality controller for Class 1 parts
SHAPE IDENTIFICATION
SMART Control identifies the folds in relation to their real shape, calculates their position and their precise orientation in space.
FIBER ORIENTATION CONTROL
SMART Control controls the fiber orientation of the plie before and after positioning (0.2°).
PLY POSITIONING
SMART Control detects the actual fold contours and allows a comparison between the theoretical and actual position of the fold edges.
FOD AND MATERIAL DEFECTS
SMART Control detects and locates defects on composite materials, detects the presence of foreign objects on the ply (size > 0.2cm²) and locates their positions.
Universal vacuum gripper tool installed on a mobile system (robotic arm for example). SMART Gripper can complement our automatic control solution SMART Control to check in real time the conformity of the lay-up to the theoretical plan.
•Unique standardized module (500x300mm)
•Several modules can be combined to handle larger folds
•60 independently controlled suction cups allow you to pick up folds of different sizes and shapes
SMART Injection is a solution for injecting resin into dry preforms (RTM process) by optimising the volume of resin used to the minimum necessary and limiting losses to a minimum. SMART Injection is a compact, innovative system with a capacity of 0 to 30cl, heating up to 120°C and pressure up to 8 bars.
•Reliability: automated cycle
•Time: easy cleaning of the SMART Injection block and no injection machine cleaning
•Ecological: no resin waste in the injection machine and in the injection pipes
•Decrease consumables cost: no injection pipes
The injection machine is also available with a capacity up to 60cl, and with a pressure up to 20 bar (optional).
The most basic and oldest fabrication method for thermoset composites is hand lay-up, which typically consists of laying dry fabric layers by hand onto a tool to form a laminate stack.
Today, most composite parts are draped manually and in order to meet increasing production rates, we totally re-examined this production process by developing an automated technology capable of taking one or more plies from an initial reference and placing them in their final position (flat or 3D) according to the lay-up plan (SMART Pick & Place).
Our SMART Control solution can complement the SMART Pick & Place in order to check at 100% the confirmity of the draping.
•Reduction of cycle time
•Improved quality and repeatability for production
•Improvement of the working environment
•Adaptable to different composite materials (dry and prepreg materials)