Solutions for the automation of specialty rubber products
Manufacturers of reinforced rubber products often have quite a challenge when it comes to the production of these products. For most of these mandrel-built products, they are usually specialty products or products within a niche market.?
Due to the complexity of these products, the production behind them is often labor-intensive. Furthermore, since the industry they are used in can be very niche, advanced knowledge is required for designing and manufacturing them. As such, these products have relatively high costs.?
Currently, manufacturers are still able to manufacture these products in parts of Europe and North America. However, rising costs have increased the need to find cost-reducing solutions to this issue.?
Moving production to low-wage countries in Eastern Europe or Asia is the most common way to reduce production costs for most manufacturers. However, this has proven unsuccessful in most cases for several different reasons, such as quality issues, IP loss, unacceptable lead times, and increased shipping and labor costs. Therefore manufacturers are now looking into optimization and automation solutions to enable local manufacturing at competitive costs.?
Challenges with automation
However, the route to automation has not been an easy one for reinforced rubber products, due to their specific characteristics.?
Specialty rubber products often have the following specifications:
The manufacturing of these products involves many non-continuous processes, making automation a much more challenging task. As these products involve a large variety of products, materials, and product sizes, the machines used to make them will require flexible processes and control. Furthermore, the labor and skill intensity is a major issue, as it is difficult to capture engineering and manufacturing knowledge in systems.?
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Introduction to TANIQ’s solution
With TANIQ’s new technology, it now introduces the possibilities of both optimizing the product design as well as automating its production. Rather than trying to automate the manual process, which comes with the multitude of issues mentioned earlier, TANIQ’s solution is to redesign the product altogether. This new design leads to both cost and performance improvements, and also enables the automation of production using fully automated robotic winding systems.?
Furthermore, it is not only the production process that is automated; the design process is digitalized and automated. Here at TANIQ, we have developed our CAD and CAM software for the design process, FEA analysis, and production of rubber products. The knowledge of the new designs is captured and embedded in customized software for the client, making it such that their employees can make high-quality products with only 1-2 days of training.?
Furthermore, the operator of the machine can follow step-by-step instructions on the touchscreen, guiding them through the process. This combats the barrier to entry of needing a high skill level, as an operator can be trained to make highly complex products in only one week, as opposed to the usual three to nine months of training.?
Find out more about TANIQ
TANIQ has more than 15 years of experience in optimizing rubber products using their new technology approach. TANIQ’s technology has been applied in a wide range of rubber hose products, such as rubber expansion joints, pipe-plugs, lifting bags, dredge-hoses, and many other specialty rubber products.?
To find out more about how TANIQ can provide manufacturing solutions for your brand, visit our website.