SMC Molding compound | Composite manufacturing technology

Sheet Molding Compound

The Process

SMC molding does not require to deal with reactive liquid matrices. The material, commonly found in sheets of pre-impregnated chopped carbon fibers is iteratively cut and weighed until a package of the required amount is ready for loading. This operation may be manual or performed through dedicated feeding systems.
SMC bulks are positioned into the mold; here, the pattern is highly dependant on the part geometry and design of the flowing directions of the material.
The press closes and the material flows until the mould is filled.

Features and advantages

Industrial process for the compression molding of short fiber pre-impregnated compounds, SMC molding allows to take advantage of the astonishing flowability of this material, to obtain complex geometries which could not be achieved with layer forming technologies.
Cannon presses sophisticate parallelism control system allows for a high performance control of the part repeatability even in case of high eccentricity of the mold reaction force.
Automated loading of the material and unloading of the part, as well as part thickness control may also be integrated to the equipment.

Automotive, Structural

Aerospace