Brazilian Furniture Foam Manufacturer Breaks Capacity Bottleneck with TDB-2200 Splitting Machine

The client is a furniture foam manufacturer based in Brazil, producing PU sponge components for sofa and mattress assembly. The plant supplies upholstery factories and mattress makers in its region, and its product mix includes thin lamination sheet, medium cushioning sheet and thicker support layers, all cut from purchased PU blocks.

Production is organised around a continuous flow: blocks are stored, cured, split into sheet, then bonded with fabric or film and cut to component size. The splitting stage sets the pace for everything downstream, because a sheet that is out of tolerance cannot be recovered at lamination.

Before the upgrade, the plant relied on an older horizontal splitting unit with manually set knife entry. As order volume grew, three problems appeared at the same time.

• Thickness variation: sheet thickness drifted across the block width and over the length of a run, which showed up as uneven bonding at lamination and as rejects at final inspection.
• Knife maintenance downtime: the knife had to be dressed at the end of a shift or when the cut face deteriorated, so the machine sat idle during production hours.
• Block size limitation: larger blocks had to be reduced before splitting, which added a handling step and produced extra end trim.

The plant needed more sheet per shift without adding a second splitting line, and it needed the thickness to stay inside a narrow band so that lamination could run without constant adjustment.

Xinmeiteng proposed the TDB-2200, a full-servo horizontal splitting machine built for PU sponge processing. The machine accepts a block up to 3000 × 2200 × 1250 mm and splits it into sheet from 0.5 mm to 70 mm, with a thickness tolerance of ±0.05 mm in the 0.5–2 mm band.

Two features addressed the plant's specific problems. Automatic knife grinding dresses the edge during production instead of at the end of a shift, and automatic knife entry feeding removes the manual edge reset that used to be part of every changeover. The grinding unit also carries a dust blowing cleaning function and a lighting device, so the grinding area stays clear and the operator can see the edge condition while the machine runs.

The machine was installed on a levelled concrete floor with clear access at the infeed and take-off sides. Commissioning covered frame levelling, servo parameter checks, knife entry setting and a trial run on the plant's own block sizes. The first sheets were measured at both edges and at both ends of the block to confirm that the thickness band held across the full width.

Operators were trained on block positioning, thickness setting, knife grinding checks and sheet take-off. Because the knife care is automatic, the training focus moved from blade handling to material handling and quality checking, which shortened the learning period for new operators.

With the thickness band under control, the lamination line no longer needed constant adjustment, and the plant was able to run thinner sheet for composite panels without adding a second splitting machine. The reduction in knife-related downtime also allowed the plant to schedule splitting across the full shift instead of reserving time at the end of it.

• The bottleneck was addressed at the source: sheet tolerance, not machine speed, was limiting the downstream line.
• Knife care moved into the production window: automatic grinding removed the end-of-shift maintenance block.
• Larger blocks can be handled directly: one handling step was removed from the front of the process.
• Training time came down: with automatic knife entry, operators manage material and quality rather than blade settings.

The plant is now reviewing the rest of the line for the same logic: identify the stage that limits output, then remove the variation at that stage rather than adding capacity after it. For foam converters in the same position, the practical starting point is a short review of block sizes, target sheet thickness and the tolerance the lamination line can accept, because those three figures decide if a servo-driven splitting machine pays for itself.