Office furniture enters a new era of laser production line revolution

In 2019, the total output value of global office furniture will reach US $53 billion, accounting for about 12% of the total global furniture output, and it is highly concentrated in eight countries, accounting for about 78% of the total output. They are China, the United States, Germany, Japan, India, Canada, Brazil and Italy. At present, China's output exceeds 16 billion US dollars, accounting for 31% of the global output of office furniture, becoming the world's first office furniture producer.

However, the development of office furniture industry in foreign countries is more mature. The top 10 brands account for more than half of the market share. Take Skye and Hayworth of the United States as an example, they account for more than 40% of the market in the United States.

Under the influence of the epidemic, the trend of global mobile office is becoming more and more obvious. From Facebook and Microsoft allowing employees to telecommuting to countries closing down again for the epidemic, the demand for office furniture is rising. Take the European and American markets as an example. It has been almost a year since the outbreak. The online sales of office furniture in Europe and America have increased by nearly 50% (Amazon data). In the domestic market, more and more people begin to pay attention to their spine health, so office furniture with aesthetic design and ergonomics is more and more popular.

At present, this market segment is still in its infancy in China. Judging from the current market situation in Europe and the United States, the products of this industry have high technology content and considerable additional profits. Enterprises engaged in office furniture not only need to have metal processing technology knowledge, but also need to be proficient in furniture design and understand the needs of end users. Only by organic combination of the three can the unique modeling and functional advantages of office furniture be brought into full play. Who can crack the combination of the three, who can expand new market space, in the future of China's market competition.

What is the limitation of unifying the production process of office furniture?

The traditional production process of office furniture generally follows 8-9 processes, such as sawing, CNC processing, bevel processing, proofing, punching, drilling, bending, cleaning and welding.

It is not only complicated, but also faced with great difficulties

·High scrap rate: traditional furniture pipe processing, whether it is sawing machine, punch or processing center and other equipment processing, there will be certain processing error, the more process flow, the greater the processing error will accumulate.

·Burr grinding: the accuracy and quality of the pipe after processing will directly affect the effect of the final product. Pipe peripheral deformation, pipe inner wall burr and so on are not allowed for high-end furniture manufacturing. However, manual deburring, trimming and cleaning are inevitable in the subsequent process, whether it is sawing or punching.

·High cost: for sawing, punching and drilling in traditional processing mode, each link from feeding, positioning, processing to sorting needs manual control. Therefore, we can often see a lot of equipment and workers in the workshop of furniture processing enterprises. Labor cost accounts for a large part of enterprise profits.

·Process limitations: now the demand of consumers is becoming more and more personalized, so furniture design must be the same, while the traditional sawing machine, punching machine, drilling machine and other equipment are old-fashioned, simple process can not support the new design. The limitations of traditional processing mode will seriously hinder the pace of R & D and output of new products.

·Low efficiency: the sawing machine has certain advantages for the simultaneous cutting and oblique cutting of multiple pipes, but for the opening cutting of pipes, it needs to constantly change the cutting angle and position of the saw blade for multiple positioning cutting, so this processing method can not control the accuracy. But for the furniture industry, there are many demands for the hole types of pipe splicing and welding. Unless customers are willing to spend energy and cost to develop various different molds, they will not lose.

·It is difficult to process small pipes: the specifications of raw materials and pipes for furniture manufacturing are various, the minimum outer diameter of the pipe is only 10 mm, and the wall thickness of the pipe is only 0.5 mm. The biggest problem in the processing of this kind of small pipe is that the rigidity and strength of the pipe itself is low, and it is easy to be deformed by external force, such as bending and torsion of the pipe, depression and bulge after extrusion, etc. The traditional processing procedures, such as sawing machine cutting, sawing machine processing section and inclined plane, punch punching, drilling, etc., are contact processing methods that force the shape of pipe to deform by external force extrusion. Often, in the final stage of finished product, the surface of pipe has been scratched or even deformed, which requires secondary manual repair, which is time-consuming and laborious.

Which process can really open up the gap of product added value?

First, let's look at the production process of an office furniture enterprise in Germany

Interestingly, not only this enterprise, but also many famous furniture enterprises at home and abroad are compared. It is found that in the whole furniture production process, the biggest difference in the technological process is in the process of pipe processing, and it really opens up the gap of product added value in this process.

The core value of furniture products should be the combination of comfort, creative design and convenient use, and the key to achieve this is to realize the designer's ideas and ideas perfectly through process design and pipe processing. Through laser tube cutting, not only can the inclination and slotting of each part be realized, but also the extremely demanding precision machining can be achieved. Therefore, the ultimate pursuit of future furniture product design can be stimulated. It can be said that laser has created a leap forward development of office furniture product design concept.

What are the specific applications of laser technology?

As a new tool of metal processing in recent years, fiber laser cutting is gradually replacing the traditional cutting, punching, drilling, sawing and other methods. Office furniture industry has many stainless steel pipes, which is in line with the advantages of optical fiber laser cutting. This non-contact processing method effectively avoids the problem of pipe deformation under the traditional processing method. At the same time, the cutting section is neat and smooth, there is no burr, and the post grinding process is reduced, which has the dual advantages of efficiency and quality.

At the same time, the professional fiber laser pipe cutting machine is used in the steel furniture industry, which brings new changes to the pipe processing technology

L originally need to weld, now can be fixed by clip;

L the original need to splice, can be directly bent;

In the past, the utilization rate of pipes was very low. Now we can use the common edge cutting function to achieve better pipe saving and more product output

Because of the unique advantages of laser pipe cutting, it breaks through the limitations of traditional pipe processing technology, and makes the future office furniture products beautiful in design, convenient in installation, beneficial to healthy office, and more popular with it and senior white-collar workers.

TruLaser tube 3000 fiber

This pipe cutting machine integrates sawing, drilling, stamping, milling and other processes of standard pipe processing. It also can reduce the workload of welding, assembly and other downstream processes in many scenarios. For example, through the tenon design for multiple pipe welding.

In the field of office furniture, German TRUMPF (ites2021 booth No. 6-g01) flexible laser pipe cutting technology has been applied to more than 1500 furniture related enterprises in the world, which has not only met the needs of customers, but also accumulated rich industry application experience.

Laser metal cutting industry after more than ten years of rapid development, has become increasingly mature, mining more fast-growing market segments has become a consensus in the industry. Regardless of the furniture industry, bus industry, rail transit industry, machinery manufacturing industry, fitness equipment industry, pipe applications everywhere. The flexible pipe cutting system of tongkuai TRUMPF (Booth No. 6-g01) will appear in Shenzhen industrial exhibition from March 30 to April 2 next year. There are also Han's (Booth No. 8-c01), Hongshan's (Booth No. 8-g01), Baichao's (Booth No. 8-h01), Yawei's (Booth No. 8-l01), Jin Fangyuan's (Booth No. 8-m01), Pentium's (Booth No. 6-g20) and Huagong's (Booth No. 8-m01) Hundreds of laser enterprises, including Linchuang (Booth No. 6-f01), Lixing laser (Booth No. 6-b66), Xunlei (Booth No. 6-h01), haimuxing (Booth No. 6-m01), Han's Songgu (Booth No. 6-m66), mingra laser (Booth No. 6-c66), Yangli (Booth No. 6-r30) and jietaike (Booth No. 6-k36), demonstrated the latest sheet metal and pipe processing technology on site.