A reliance on laminating science

Reliant Machinery says it is helping to create some major aerospace seating innovations in laminations that are sure to have you sitting more comfortably on your next long-haul flight.

The modular laminating equipment specialist is a leading manufacturer of flatbed laminating, equipment. Established in 1969, the company's equipment can process a wide range of applications, including continuously fed as well as cut piece and sheeted products, and depending on the product specification, it can laminate multilayers in one pass too.

Reliant has recently identified aircraft seating as a growing market. The company claims the key factors driving the requirements for its laminating technology comprise weight-saving, biological, aesthetic and efficiency advantages.
The manufacture of passenger seating has been mainly sewing-based, which requires thicker and heavier weights of foam to achieve the stiffness and flat surfaces required. Using Reliant's lamination systems, such as films, webs and powder adhesives, thinner foams can be used to achieve the same level of stiffness, providing significant weight savings for each seat produced. The laminating system means fully-upholstered, flexible and removable seat covers can be produced that are easily hygienically cleaned and refitted.

“A lot of our technology is now being used in the manufacture of aerospace seating products, especially in the US,” begins the company's international sales manager, Neil Weisfeld. “The construction of passenger seating tends to involve textiles, foams, non-wovens and wovens as core basic material products. A huge advantage for us is that our lamination technology is gradually replacing traditional sewing processes, because sewing tends to create indentations in the materials just by the very nature of its production process.

“Take advantages like weight saving; the airline operator often wants to achieve the aesthetics of a smooth, flat seating surface. Lamination is ideal for this feature, because once the textile cover has been laminated with the foam, non-woven or whatever combination, it won't move on itself, whereas if it's sewn, it's only held where there's stitching; the area in between the stitching isn't fixed as such. This means the airline operator can often use lighter or thinner materials which give them these desirable weight saving advantages - a key element of the aerospace industry.”

Seal of approval

Weisfeld adds that efficiency-wise, there are huge cost savings to be made in seat cover production by using lamination compared with sewing operations.

“The advantage of a textile covering is that it can be manufactured using a continuous reel-to-reel application, which can then be cut into panels afterwards. The amount of sewing – which is inevitably a hand operator process - is manually very intensive, significantly slower, and therefore more expensive.

“Other key advantages concern hygiene and biological issues. A laminated seat cover isn't fixed to the basic material, so it's far easier for the airline operator to remove and dry clean it. It also means they don't have so many indentation lines from the stitching. Imagine how many crumbs of food get stuck in these stitch holes! Also, they can ‘laminate in' barrier breathable membrane films, which can be used for these types of applications and can potentially provide both hygiene and comfort advantages.”

In terms of the market segments, Weisfeld says that many industries, including aerospace are using composite materials in combination with various specialised foams, films and foils in a variety of different ways. Reliant's machinery is set up to handle a range of materials including: CFRP, GRP, wovens, non wovens, aramids, multi-layer composites and prepregs.

“Applications for the aerospace industry comprise the coating of carbon fibre composites with various polymers to give certain handling properties. This is a fairly typical application for our production equipment. Customers might typically be coating an epoxy onto carbon fibre, whether it be woven, triaxial, multiaxial or unidirectional (UD). Another application is producing 0-90° applications for UD where the customer will take the UD material in one direction and then cut or layup cross-plies which are then laminated onto the surface to product the 0-90° or in some cases 45°. This process can be performed on the same machine. There are many different application systems for the composites industry alone!

Designs on production

Reliant's Luton-based facility covers R&D, design, assembly and operational control. The company also has an operation set up in the Czech Republic where all its metallic components are manufactured.

The company offers three approaches for supplying its equipment for in-line production: a basic standalone system comprising a laminating/compression system unit; a second stage involving Reliant providing a turnkey line, which takes raw materials in whatever format to produce product at the end of its line; and either integrating a standalone piece of equipment or a bigger production line-type system into an existing production line such as a multi-axial weaving system or a UD tow production system.

“One of the key focuses of our business is flexibility in terms of what we offer the customer and how they can use our equipment in their own set-up. Our Luton facility has a complete production line which acts as a demonstration and testing facility which customers can use for trials and demonstrations. It's a huge advantage, because the customer can get ‘hands-on' with the equipment, measure what it can achieve in terms of output and how it can be adapted to their requirements.

“Our product range starts from laboratory scale equipment. The narrowest piece of equipment we build starts at 45cm wide and currently goes up to 3m. From a supply chain point of view, we provide equipment that can literally be a table-top scale development machine right up to a full-scale wide-width production line.”

Alongside the laminators and compression systems, Reliant produces a large range of handling equipment, such as winding equipment for unwinding batch roll materials, conveyor systems for feeding, various different types for adhesive coating systems and infrared pre-heaters.

“Our most recent technological development focuses on the composites industry with what we call our Powerbond HPC (high pressure composites) modular machine,” Weisfeld concludes. “The aim is to offer equipment that can handle a large range of composite applications – from something basic like coating a web to producing a rigid board by compression of sheets of composite materials. The technology is capable of covering extreme ends of the process on one machine.

“It's not that uncommon for a customer to order a relatively short production line whilst they are in a development phase. However, once they launch the product and volumes increase, they need to extend and ramp up the production speed. With our modular machinery they can do this without having to purchase a completely new line that could involve a substantial further investment. The unique feature of our systems' technology is the huge amount of flexibility they can offer.”

www.reliant-machinery.com