The scaffolding coupler was developed by StrucTemp and LUMA-ID and was exhibited at the Futurebuild trade show in January.

In the past two years, whether in the hands of the product design company that produced it, or in the hands of civil engineers with experience in the construction industry, they have handled the prototype very carefully.

At the Futurebuild trade show in January, sintered aluminum pieces, a new design of scaffolding couplers, were hitting and hitting the cold metal frame that it was designed to connect together. For more than 100 years, the design of the scaffolding connector has not changed, so those clinks and knocks know how much they should endure, they know how long it usually takes to tighten the parts, and they know when they have encountered great potential.

"They got it immediately," Mark Little, LUMA-ID director and product designer, told TCT a week later. "When you spend so much time designing something and it is used by people in the industry for the first time, it is really satisfying, hitting it on the scaffolding and doing their thing, they [asked]'What am I Time to have this?'"

The civil engineer who conceived the coupler design was the managing partner of StrucTemp, a structural and temporary engineering service company with more than 36 years of experience. During that time, Shiraz Dudhia had been hurdling and avoiding the threaded studs protruding from the traditional coupler, and asked: "Has anyone come up with something better than this?"

Explain that the frustration of LUMA-ID led to the design of the scaffold coupler without external or sharp parts and shortened threads, allowing the user to tighten the device in just two seconds. This design also has typical wall thickness and dimensions, which have been verified using SOLIDWORKS software and Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) technology in the course of 18 months.

"At Luma, we don't like over-theorizing. We like to print something, test it, see how it works and where it fails," Little said. "When you are dealing with something so hand-held and repetitive, if you haven't tested it first, you don't want to spend hours on an idea."

With FDM, the coupler was printed in two parts and riveted together, but as Futurebuild approached, they switched to direct metal laser sintering (DMLS). Using the DMLS outsourced by LUMA, the coupler is printed in a single piece of aluminum and designed as a folded piece with gaps to limit the number of redesigns when it is put into production.

The manufacturing process of the scaffolding connector is still to be determined-metal folding is an option that the partners have prepared, but the casting still exists on the table. Although the additive manufacturing of these parts doesn't make much sense-"The number of scaffold couplers produced worldwide is crazy. I don't want to quote them because they sound unreal."-The technology can still play an important role.

"3D printing provides you with 80% of the answers, which is enough to make you confident and continue to use the tool. This will be a slightly different attribute, things may break and fail, but you put on your engineering hat and try to avoid Anything obvious," Little of said, entering the production stage. "I always like to go to the supplier and say,'We have this; from a cost point of view, what is the best approach? Then, we can design around it."

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