At the recently held textile processing exhibition Texprocess, Andy Rhodes spoke to Holger Kunz, managing director of automation company Formhand, about its technologies for textile applications
With textile automation technologies playing an increasingly vital role in today’s industry, Formhand Automation GmbH presented its grippers at Texprocess 2019. The company states that its grippers enable new processes, such as draping, preforming or assembly, of textile-like material.
Based in the northern city of Braunschweig, Formhand is a spin-off from Technischen Universität Braunschweig (Technical University of Braunschweig) and develops and distributes its highly adaptable grippers for production and logistics. The company’s researchers, Christian Löchte and Holger Kunz, have been working on the Formhand technology since 2011. The scientific collaboration has resulted in numerous patent applications.
Thus far, the company’s grippers have been used in the fields of preforming textiles for RTM production processes of fibre-reinforced plastics.
In this video interview, Kunz discusses the company’s technologies and why exhibiting at Texprocess for the first time this year was a part of their growth plan going forward.
Formhand states that the idea to create the its technology lies in different research projects, which started back in 2011. The findings of these research activities led to the company winning the JEC Innovation Award in 2014. Besides the application in the field of production of fibre-reinforced plastics, Formhand has a wide range of applications in sheet-metal press-workshops and in the warehouse logistics, such as commissioning or picking of customer driven orders.
In the context of Industry 4.0, flexibilisation in production and logistics in the textile industry is becoming increasingly important. The company suggests that its grippers offer good potential in automation for the currently manual driven handling processes in this field.
Formhand grippers consist of a granulate filled cushion which can adapt to different shapes. This cushion is evacuated by an airflow for gripping. The combination of gripper cushion and airflow offers many advantages for the handling of limp and porous objects as textile plies, leather cut-outs or thin layers of print paper. On the one hand, the gripper cushion provides a continuous gripping area which supports limp objects while transporting. This way the objects are kept in shape and crimpling and bending is avoided. On the other hand, the airflow through the cushion generates a gentle gripping force onto objects with any surface. By this airflow the objects are fully attached to the compacted gripper cushion.
The modular design of Formhand grippers and the easy-to-scale-technology allow the construction of grippers in different sizes and shapes. This allows an extremely wide range of parts to be covered. Further benefits, the company states, include the gripping of porous, flexible and limp objects, the gripper cushion’s soft surface and gentle handling, and the high adaptability of the grippers.
For more information on Formhand, visit: www.formhand.de
