Ding Feng Spiral Technology Co. Ltd. (Short for “DFS”) is a joint venture co-founded by Advanced Spiral Technology Pty Ltd. (Short for “AST”) in Australia and A.S.E Manufacturing Co. Ltd. in China. This is an expansion of AST’s oversea business which will mainly focus on providing professional screw conveyor design service and sectional screw flight forming solutions.
AST was founded in 2007. Their co-founders Greg Bloxham and Scott Kelf took their fathers’ partnership named Scott Osmond Spiral, which had been making screw conveyors and other material handling equipment since 1970, to another level. Their material handling equipment company called Bulknet had been supplying Australian market since late 90s. The years of experience in forming sectional screw flights and conveyors led to the R&D for a better system which we called TruHelix® that has been widely introduced to conveyor manufacturers, digging equipment manufacturers, water recycling equipment manufactures and etc. all around the world. This advanced technology has obtained patents in many countries including US and China.
Why this system is a game changer? The traditional sectional flight forming process is either pulling or fixed die forming. They require a large number of dies to cover the various pitch, thickness and material. The handling and maintenance of the dies are time consuming and costly. For some particular shape of flights such as canting, it’s almost impossible for most of the manufacturers to make. The TruHelix® system not only can produce tapered ID&OD flights, canting flights but also can produce multi-step changing flights which can suit a complicated shaped inner shaft. Our system can produce flights from 150mm to 1800mm. The maximum thickness can go up to 20mm for carbon steel and 12mm for Abrasive Resistant steel. We tried to make one 1000mm diameter flight in 20mm thickness carbon steel. The forming took about 2mins. The whole process started from loading the flight blank into the machine, forming and final testing was less than 5mins.
The system is combined with hardware and software. The design software will take the finished flight size to calculate the blank you need to cut and then generate a drawing that you can save and send to your material provider for cutting. Then it will tell you how to set up your machine according to your product. The hardware is the forming machine which is powered by top of the line control PLC and hydraulic system. Once you enter the parameters of the flight, it will calculate the right pressure and set up for you. The whole system will minimise or even eliminate the needs of experienced operator. With a short period of training, the operator will be able to produce the consistent result all the time. The whole pack of tooling is packed in a 1m x 1m x 80cm steel box. The change of the tooling only take a few minutes. With our instruction of the set up, the maintenance of the tooling is almost none.