Industrial customers have been looking for a long time for non-intrusive mechanical fastening solutions capable of being implemented during regular production. Indeed, conventional assembly methodologies like welding, drilling or riveting are considered as hot works (i.e: risk of explosion) and intrusive (damage of the structure). They may be cheap, but also proved to be sometimes inefficient in terms of environmental & societal impact, safety, associated costs or business interruption. This is where COLD PAD brought a disruptive innovation by introducing reliable and durable structural adhesive bonding techniques for harsh and explosive industrial environments like the Hydrogen industry. Besides the important CO2 reduction potential, our market creating innovation offers a value proposition to lower both capital and operational expenditures linked to structural asset integrity.
COLD PAD’s breakthrough idea to respond to this market need was to bring a new generation of fasteners bonded onto the surface (rather than in the material) with virtually no impact on the support. This was made possible thanks to a set of technologies bringing reliable and repeatable conditions for bonded assemblies and service life even in marine and harsh industrial environments. The disruption is both product-based with the fastener itself and process-based with the installation tooling creating an optimal and humidity-controlled environment. The technology called C-Claw is today protected by a series of 5 patent families.
COLD PAD’s technology is already widely accepted in the Nuclear and Marine&Offshore industry as a reliable solution to make construction and repairs easier and safer. Our challenge was to scale up our technology.
Hence, the objective of the project was to :
• Extend C-Claw fastener range, improve productivity and enhance robustness and reliability of our installation tool
• Prepare industrial scale up with volume target of 200 000 fasteners/year and 1000 installation tools
• Have an ATEX certified version of the C-Hawk (for safe use in potentially explosive atmosphere)
• Prepare our organization for the industrial scale
