Automatic thermoformer

in-line

Hot forming, including press hardening, is used to produce high-strength car body parts. In the Front of Line, blanks are separated in the conventional manner and then transported through a furnace where they are heated to a temperature of over 900°C. They are then formed while still hot. Quick loading times are crucial for this process to prevent excessive cooling. That makes traversing feeder systems ideal for this application. Throughout the past decade, Strothmann has successfully automated numerous hot forming plants in a variety of standardised stages of expansion. Depending on the requirements Strothmann uses two different basic solutions – the feeder and the transfer concept. Carriages on the RoundTrack system for feeding and discharging blank stacks in the Front of Line area guarantee an uninterrupted stack change. They are equipped with spreading magnets, the cover plate is equipped with specific alignment units and centring aids based on the customer’s requests. Fence elements at the cart ends close the protective circuit during the stack change. Spreading magnets can either be placed as posts on pantograph arms with an approach function on the blank cart or arranged on the side of the blank cart with an automatic approach. Traversing feeders with additional rotary axes are used for destacking the blanks. By using two feeder modules on a joint main axis, different types of blanks can be collected in one batch.