Wind blades contain foam or wood material as core material to achieve a sandwich laminate structure to be rigid, yet lightweight. All these core materials need to be pre-cut and shaped into hundreds of different forms so that they can be placed perfectly into the mould conforming the 3D geometry of the wind blade mould. For lay-up efficiency, all kitted core materials need to be labelled with their part numbers and also in certain cases, the blade and mould name. BTU-TECH’s customer did not want to invest in highly-priced inkjet heads for CNC machines. So, BTU-TECH had to develop a simple and effective design that utilizes the board marker pen. The result was a fast, efficient, low investment and almost no-maintenance CNC controlled 2D printer which can print not only foam & wood core materials for composite industry but also on different substrates such as panels, metals, flat objects related to different industries.
