Louviére, Pirey, France - Dimeco Alipresse has developed a new range of machines that combines the unmatched flexibility of laser cutting with the well-known productivity of coil-fed processes. The Linacut opens a huge field of productivity by reducing scrap rate, cutting labor costs, increasing manufacturing capacity, and allowing a better response to customers’ demands.
Focused on processing strips from 0.3 to 4mm thick, this high-tech cutting line consists of a coil-handling section, a Linacut continuous laser cutting module, and an optional automatic robotic stacking cell. This combination processes all metal materials: mild or HSLA steel, galvanized, aluminized, pre-coated, filmed, stainless steel, laminations, aluminum, and copper.
With over 25 years of success in the field, Dimeco offers a complete range of CNC punching solutions from coil: the Flexilines. As a natural extension of Flexilines, Dimeco has revealed the first continuous laser cutting machine operating from coil. The development of Linacut required thousands hours of work for Dimeco engineers in cooperation with leading OEMs and famous software publishers. This innovation, offering many benefits to users, is protected by several patents.
Linacut provides incomparable flexibility and productivity to companies wishing to increase their production capacity, to optimize their cost prices, and to respond quicker to market requirements.
Cycle time reduction is gained because the blank loading operation is no longer required and coil change is only necessary when changing material quality. Depending on the application, the manufacturing time can be reduced by 10 to 80 percent.
With lower cycle time and significant overall equipment efficiency increases, the Linacut is three times more productive than a laser table and it can also be used as a cut-to-length line. Now users can produce in-house, upon request and to customer sizes, the blanks required by other turret punch presses and lasers.
A gantry robot provides continuous offloading of the various parts and stacks according to the selected packing configuration. If the part is longer than 4m, it is removed at the end of the slat conveyor. Skeleton splitting is managed by the CAM processor.
The Linacut is suitable for strip thicknesses from 0.3 to 4mm, without length limitation. It can cut numerous materials: mild steel, high tensile, stainless, aluminum, and copper. The coil handling line can be fitted with a device removing protective film prior to cutting. It is well adapted to the production of discs. With Linacut laser cutting, any part design change is instantly materialized. Setup time is shortened and tooling cost almost nil.
The line is fed by a moving coil car that ensures the loading of up to 5-ton, 1400mm maxi diameter coils on a dual decoiler fitted with hydraulic expansion. The band is inserted into a precision rectifier, which provides a high degree of plastification to the material to avoid part leveling further down the process flow. The laser head (supplied by Precitec) is installed in a very rigid gantry. Ultra-light 2D moving parts are driven by linear motors. The laser source is a 2kW fiber type (supplied by Rofin).
Cut part offloading, sorting, and stacking are fully automatically and continuously operated by a 6-axis robot (supplied by FANUC) mounted on a gantry through a seventh straight axis. It provides pick-and-place operation in 7s. The control panel receives the line supervisor and a monitoring screen dedicated to the CAM processor. The laser cutting module performances (speeds, accelerations) are similar to those of the best 2D tables of the market.
To learn about additional advantages of the system, please visit http://www.dimeco-alipresse.com.