Composites Are Ideal for High-Speed Automation Equipment

1. Composites Are Ideal for High-Speed Automation Equipment If your company is involved in the design and manufacturing of any kind of high-speed automation equipment, you have come to the right place for manufacturing materials. Composites are ideal for what you do. Carbon fiber is especially attractive because it is lightweight, strong, and fairly easy to work with. We carry just about everything you will need to fabricate parts for your automation equipment. You'll find our inventory includes fabrics, prepregs, carbon fiber sheets, tubes, and so forth. We also have a complete line of epoxies and resins. If you need something other than carbon fiber, just ask. We also deal in glass fiber, Kevlar, and a few other materials. Lighter Weights Increase Speed One of our clients is a company that manufactures high-speed robotic coating systems for aerospace, industrial, and military applications. These are essentially top-of-the-line robots capable of applying all sorts of coatings evenly while working at high speeds. From our perspective, one of the keys to what they did is lighter weights. Whenever you are building something with maximum speed in mind, you have to think about weight. Reduce the weight of your robot and you'll be able to increase its speed. That is what makes carbon fiber so ideal for these kinds of applications. Carbon fiber is stronger and lighter than both steel and aluminum. Imagine building a robotic coating system from steel. It would be so heavy and cumbersome that you would have to limit its speed. Even if you could get it going at high speed, doing so would be dangerous. But replace that steel with carbon fiber and you completely change the game. Obviously, a coating machine will not be made entirely of carbon fiber. Other materials are in play. But using carbon fiber where appropriate drastically reduces weight without sacrificing strength. Precision is Another Concern Reduced weight is not the only reason for choosing carbon fiber. Precision is another concern. You want high-speed equipment to perform the same way with every cycle. Whatever that equipment is designed to do, you want it to be done with precision. Composite materials can be fabricated to within very tight tolerances. They can also be fabricated into shapes that would be impossible using steel or aluminum. Both of these characteristics result in a more precise robot capable of more precise tasks.

2. We can easily see why this would be important with a high-speed coating machine. In that business, you want coats applied evenly across the entire surface of the material you are working with. You also want every coat to be identical. Finally, you want to be able to coat multiple parts with as little waste as possible. All of this requires precision. Customized Automation Equipment Still not convinced that carbon fiber is your best choice for high-speed automation equipment? Then consider customization. Working with composites affords more opportunities to build machines to unique specifications. Composites can be shaped and sized precisely to create machines that are anything but off-the-shelf. An added bonus is that composite prototyping facilitates custom design at faster speeds and at an overall lower cost. Simply put, it's a lot easier to prototype a new piece of high-speed equipment using carbon fiber as compared to more traditional materials. We may be biased, but we think composite materials are ideal for building high-speed automation equipment. Materials like carbon fiber bring so much to the table that they are hard to ignore. If you are in the business of designing or building such equipment, we'd like to talk with you. Let's get together and figure out how composite materials can make what you do better.