It is all very well investing in a ‘blisteringly fast’ 10kW fibre laser cutting machine, which — following its introduction by Swiss firm Bystronic — is currently the most powerful available in the sheet metal-working industry, but how can users feed it with material fast enough?

Answering this question was the main theme presented to 120 visitors at a three-day Open House held by Bystronic UK Ltd (www.bystronic.com) at its Coventry headquarters and showroom towards the end of September.

To give an indication of the importance of material replenishment, a 10kW BySprint or ByStar fibre laser machine can position itshead at 140m/min and cut 1mm mild steel at 60m/min, which means — subject to the complexity of the nest of components — some cycles can be completed in a matter of minutes.

Sales manager Andrew Richert highlighted the benefits and capabilities of various handling and storage systems, ranging from the manually operated ByLoader through to ByTrans and its Extended variant for loading and unloading sheet to the latest ByTrans Cross.

The latter’s modular design offers users full automation for producing long runs of components, while retaining the flexibility of manual handling for fulfilling smaller jobs.

It can be integrated between a laser cutting centre and a warehouse, but it is equally suitable as a stand-alone solution — and with the addition of an optional BySort bridge and two sorting heads with gripper modules, the unloading and stacking of components from the skeleton can be achieved automatically and quickly by robot.

Also featured was how to extract maximum productivity from the company’s press brakes via optical systems and software within the ‘BySoft suite’ that make it practically impossible to load the wrong tooling or position the segments incorrectly along the top beam.

Attention was also focused on the Xpert 80, an 80-tonne 1.5m press brake that has been introduced alongside a 40-tonne 1m model to form a range that can be conveniently relocated within a factory by fork-lift truck and boost productivity by avoiding having to use a large slower press brake to bend small components.