pullCUBE is the worlds smallest pultrusion machine, which will turn the composites market u p side down and enable pultrusion within many more industrial sectors and applications. pullCUBE will come with never seen dimensions and advantages such as safety features, sustainability, product Technik +Innovation quality and design as well as the capability to produce straight and curved profiles within one and the same pultrusion system, which is game changing!
State of the art: Todays pultrusion machines are based on alternating or catterpillar pulling devices. These machines have a huge footprint with a high effort for assembly, setup as well as the transport of these. Due to the footprint of ca. 15 to 20 meters, in most cases a new facility has tobe built. In regards to sustainability of existing pultrusion equipment the waste of fibers is very high because the initial process setup is made with dry fibers before the impregnation is started, meaning a 1 S m machine at least has an amount of wasted fibers of around 20 m before each production cycle. In addition a so called purge, for mold cleaning every 1 S to 30 minutes meanwhile production, is required, which as well creates a huge amount of wasted frp profiles at least of the length of a mold of typically one meter. In fact pultrusion has not seen many innovations until today.
The pultrusion technology on which pullCUBE is based, is named moving mould technology (patented) or Radius Pultrusion as its brand name, a pultrusion technology better described as continuous molding process, which had its breakthrough when the "Corvette Stingray 2020" was officially announced in July 2019. lt carries the worlds first curved pultruded carbon fiber bumper beam produced by Shape Corp. from Grand Haven in Michigan, USA using TTl's unique Radius Pultrusion technology. The Corvette project verifies the technology and validates its serial production capabilities, which was part of Shape corp. within the joint cooperation. The veryfication and validation showed several major advantages, described in the pullCUBE key features below.
Recognizing in addition that the moving mold technology used at Shape Corp. for Corvette's bumper requires a way lower footprint than all other pultrusion technologies on the market today, TTI started to develop the worlds tirst pultrusion unit, being capable of producing straight and curved profiles within the same system with an, fully equipped, overall length of 3.5 meters, having its world premiere at JEC World 2020 in Paris!
pullCUBE key features are:
Shortest machine size ever seen in pultrusion - pullCUBE comes with an overall length of 3.5 meters, including mould, gripper unit and flying cut-off saw.
Due to the small footprint of pullCUBE, its transport is very easy. The only requirement is a fork lifter to load or unload a truck. Based on a single chassy design there is no requirement for time-consuming assemblies, which normally takes at least one week.
pullCUBE creates new opportunities for any construction areas in the world. Being limited in profile length today, due to their transportability, pullCUBE can produce in place and thus create any length required. E.g. a bridge may now have structural elements in full length as per requirement.
Due to its length of 3.5 meters pullCUBE provides lowest waste of material for setting up the production in comparison to state of the art machines with a length of at least 15 meters.
pullCUBE does not require a purge cycle. In consideration of a price of 10 Euros per meter (e.g. automotive CFRP profile) and a line speed of one meter per minute a single purge would waste at least one meter of profile each 20 minutes. This leads to 720 Euros per day in a three shift operation. Considering 200 days of production, pullCUBE will save 144.000 euros of waste per year, making it the most cost efficient and sustainable system on the market.
The choice of pullCUBE design is unique, due to the fact, that the system is completely closed. This ensures worlds highest production safety in pultrusion, because operators are not able to touch any hot mold surface, neither the gripper nore the saw.