Unison highlighting green tube benders at MACH 2010

Unison is the UK's only manufacturer of all-electric tube benders and the cost savings and environmental benefits of its innovative machine architecture are proving to be a major factor in many current sales. Unison machines only consume any significant amount of energy when actually performing a bend. A conventional hydraulically powered bender, by contrast, typically consumes energy continually, as the system's fluid has to be maintained at pressure. As an example of the energy savings, even one of the largest all-electric benders on the market today, capable of bending 150 mm outside diameter tubing, only draws up to 14-15 A/phase peak for a few seconds during bend and correction operations, before returning to its standby state, which has a consumption of just 2-3 A/phase. A further major green attribute of all-electric tube bending machinery is the virtual elimination of scrap. This is particularly advantageous for manufacturers dealing with exotic alloy tubing, and those that manufacture in small batches. When setting up a conventional hydraulic tube-bending machine for a batch, it's fairly common to create one or more pieces of scrap before the desired shape is achieved. All-electric machines can recall the program and replicate the set-up conditions precisely using software, due to the closed-loop nature of the control. At MACH 2010, users will be able to sign up to attend an innovative tour demonstrating the productivity benefits of servomotor-controlled tube bending. Unison will take attendees to see how at least two UK users exploit the advanced technology. Unison was also recently named as Yorkshire's "Most Enterprising Company Of The Year."