BBG GmbH & Co. KG continues to expand their international business and delivers a bending/hardening system to Lemken, a manufacturer of agricultural machinery, for the production of ploughs in central India. BBG currently manufactures the bending-hardening system developed in cooperation with Lemken GmbH & Co. KG from Alpen/Germany, the largest German supplier of agricultural machinery. The system is designed to shape and harden steel components to be used for the production of agricultural machinery.
The system consists of a forming unit and the hardening unit with an immersion tank. In a first step, special tools are used to form the steel components with a temperature of 900°C in the forming unit. With the help of a complex hydraulic system, the forces and speeds required for the process can be generated and controlled precisely. The system meets the stringent precision requirements defined for their components by Lemken by means of a highly rigid mechanical design.
Following the hotforming process, the hot steel components are immersed in a tank filled with a special liquid. This process must be completed within a few seconds for the components to achieve the required hardness values. Heat dissipation and the filtration of the special liquid present a major challenge to the designers. Pumps are used to agitate the liquid. The liquid must be filtered, and its temperature must only vary within a very narrow tolerance around the optimum working temperature of around 30° C. Suitable measures must be taken to compensate for the heat input of the red-hot steel components and for the ambient temperature, which may rise to 45° C during the summer in India.
BBG views the contract as another success story within the framework of their “5/50” strategy, with which they plan to increase the percentage of sales generated in industries outside the automotive sector to 50% by 2012.
