The Future of Sealing Technology Development

IT solutions of tomorrow already in use today
The sealing and bearing expert, Trelleborg Sealing Solutions, keeps up with the latest trends and developments in sealing technology and has developed a vision for the future of collaboration.

The initial question was the following: how does an interdisciplinary, global and decentralised team succeed in bundling ideas and expert knowledge in order to be able to come up with innovations?
Trelleborg provided the answer to this question by taking a closer look at the future of collaboration. The development of seals and bearings poses huge challenges for designers working on customized solutions and requires extremely accurate tools that make international development possible and allows design teams to collaborate across borders.
To illustrate this, Trelleborg Sealing Solutions presented a collaboration platform at Hannover Messe that enables developers to exchange drawings and work on them together. The center piece of this visionary solution is the all-in-one PC HP Sprout that projects a second screen onto a touch-sensitive drawing mat, in addition to the actual display, with the help of a projector. The user can produce a drawing on this mat just like they would on a drawing board and then display it virtually. This means that more precise collaborative designs will be possible in the future.
The unique thing about the PC HP Sprout is that it can be used as a collaboration solution. By arranging for a team of developers to share designs digitally with other engineers at the company as well as with customers and partners; all demands and ideas combine into one for the same product. In other words, all parties involved can share a design as if they were working at the same drawing board. The next step is for HP to develop a 3-D scanning function that will allow for real objects to be scanned in and used in the development process.
“The scanning capability would make it much easier to work with complex components where it is not immediately clear where seals will be needed,” explains Holger Baur at Trelleborg Sealing Solutions. “Today, this is still a vision for the future, but that is precisely what characterizes our competence in innovation; we are already working on completely new IT solutions that we can put to use in the future. In our demonstration at the exhibition, we showed what interdisciplinary, cross-site and intercompany collaboration might look like in the future. The goal is to improve how employees, customers and partners, but also product development, work together. The feedback from visitors to Hannover Messe was extremely positive.”
Besides this collaboration solution, Trelleborg Sealing Solutions also presented an augmented reality installation where visitors to the trade fair were able to view seals virtually. In the future, it will be possible to present a virtual, three dimensional image of products so that customers can view them from every angle. Trelleborg Sealing Solutions is therefore building a bridge between current products and innovative design techniques and visionary developments that will shape the working world of the future.