Ever since the entertainment industry started connecting pieces of steel truss together the common thread around the world has been the friendly truss bolt.
Except for a short time in the 1990’s when Cam-Loks were used to join the LSD D3 aluminium truss, the steel graded high tensile truss bolt has been the gold standard in truss safety.
With the advent of more complex metallurgy and exotic materials that standard has just risen to stratospheric heights; literally.
Design Quintessence (DQ), an industry leader in the Australasian market, has upped the ante by investing in R&D with New Zealand based company FU-TWO.
FU-TWO are international ground breakers in the area of 3D metal printing harnessing Electron Beam Melting (EBM) technology utilising additive manufacture of titanium parts.
FU-TWO supply EBM manufactured components to the aerospace, marine, Formula 1 racing and medical industries, plus they currently have more than 400 3D printed parts in space.
DQ approached FU-TWO to help solve a unique but palpable problem which is critical to all truss users, that is, truss bolt nuts were not being done up to torque specifications.
“I first became aware of this technology as I was negotiating with our design and manufacturing team leader Dr Morteza Pourmohamadi to come and work for us in Australia,” remarked Ian Wood, Managing Director of Design Quintessence. “He was running a design faculty at a university overseas and had been researching the technology there. He pointed out that the current leaders in 3D printing technology were just over the ditch, so the opportunity was on our doorstep!
“Most of our truss doesn’t use bolts for assembly but we could see potential in a lot of other assembly applications as well as introducing it to conical spigot and pin assemblies with the pin being threaded. The time saving features for the people charged with assembling truss has proven to be substantial from the tours on which the truss has been used.”
When some serious number crunching and molecular design work was completed FU-TWO were able to provide an impressive yet simple solution, a 3D printed Titanium truss bolt which features ‘heat activated malleability’ (HAM) from each part.
The revolutionary part of this invention is the absence of a nut in the equation. With this new manufacturing technique and exotic metal technology, the end of the bolt face will now flair and expand with simple application of hot air via a heat gun. The tip of the bolt will expand to four times its original diameter when hot air is applied, this results in the flanged titanium effectively shrinking and expanding; when inserted into truss it will pull the two sections of truss together with uniform torque across the truss sections bolt holes.
“The FU guys have been great to work with – first in tweaking the technology for our application and then pumping out thousands and thousands of parts to test them in full scale productions,” added Ian Wood.
This fantastic new concept has performed flawlessly in engineering tests and has been road tested in several international touring shows. The simplicity of the bolt is evident when dismantling of the truss is required, to remove the bolt all that is needed is a can of liquid nitrogen (similar to what a doctor uses to remove warts) which is sprayed on the flared end of the bolt, the sub zero temperature modifies the molecular structure of the titanium which reverses the flair and ‘shrinks’ it back to its original diameter allowing for the truss bolt to be removed. This flaring and shrinking process is good for over 100,000 applications.
To see how this revolutionary new technology works, FU-TWO have posted a video explaining the concept HERE
