Plastic Assembly Technologies (PATSONICS) has the experience and knowledge to provide you with ultrasonic horns that work best for your plastic welding application(s).
PATSONICS manufactures ultrasonic horns at a multitude of frequencies, shapes and sizes for all brands of ultrasonic welding equipment. The most common frequencies for ultrasonic welding are 15, 20, 30 and 40 KHz, but
PATSONICS also manufactures ultrasonic horns at other specialized frequencies.
PATSONICS manufactures ultrasonic horns from different raw materials based upon acoustical and mechanical properties and your specific application needs. Titanium, aluminum, CPM and tool steel are the materials used to make ultrasonic horns. The material selected for your horn is based upon what works best for your application and your programs requirements. Titanium provides excellent tensile strength and is a good choice for high gain applications, but is an expensive choice because the material is costly and takes significantly more time to machine. Titanium material is often used for standard ultrasonic circular horns in sizes up to 3.5” inches in diameter and for standard rectangular sizes up to 2.5 x 10 inches. The size of your part to be ultrasonically welded will play a role in the type of horn material to be used for your application. Large titanium ultrasonic horns can be costly to make and the titanium material can be difficult to acquire when the part size is too large. However, large rectangular block horns can be manufactured in titanium and can be useful for applications that warrant the use of titanium, regardless of the cost. We’ve made large rectangular block carbide coated titanium horns for ultrasonic cutting and for this type of application; titanium was the only material of choice, regardless of the cost.
Aerospace aluminum materials provide outstanding acoustical properties for ultrasonic horns, but are insufficient for some applications due to wear concerns created by the application or the gain required to weld the part. Some difficult to weld plastic materials require high amplitude to weld and for this reason titanium may be the best horn material for this type of application. However, for many applications the use of aluminum for manufacturing ultrasonic horns is very practical and very cost effective. Aluminum and titanium ultrasonic horns can be coated to extend tool life and improve wear resistance. This is beneficial when ultrasonically welding glass or mineral filled plastics. Tool steel ultrasonic horns are usually made for metal insertion applications, but this horn material can also be useful for low gain applications where high tool wear is probable.
Most ultrasonic horns are manufactured in common types or styles, but the devil is in the details as to what makes a good functioning horn. Standard ultrasonic horn types used are catenoidal round, exponential round, stepped round, circular solid, circular high gain, circular hollow, circular slotted, spool horns, rectangular with round corners, rectangular with square corners, rectangular slotted and rectangular block horns. Special functions like vacuum attachments, knurled faces, cavities, contour surfacing and spot welding tips can be added to these common ultrasonic horn types to make them “special” for a given application. Manufactures often make “custom” horns based upon these standard types and standard sizes. At Patsonics, we work in standard types and styles, but we deviate from the standard size concept. We make the horn to the size that works best for the application rather than try to make a standard size work for the application. This provides more customization for your special application.
PATSONICS incorporates the use of tailored FEA software created specifically for our needs in building ultrasonic horns. Using finite element analyses,
PATSONICS engineers design, analyze and simulate virtual horns that predict real world behavior. This is incredibly important to our guarantee of providing quality ultrasonic tools designed specifically for your application. Once designed, we use CNC machining centers and CNC lathes to produce high quality tooling. Using CAD/CAM software, we create tool paths used for machining precisely what we’ve designed; accurately producing reliefs, pockets and contoured surfaces into the ultrasonic horn. Our software programs accept most CAD native file formats, so please send us the CAD data of your part requiring ultrasonic assembly and we will get back to you with recommendations and a quote for ultrasonic tooling.
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Application Specific Horns