LIA Corporate Member Profile – TRUMPF, Inc.

The TRUMPF Group, headquartered in Ditzingen, Germany, is a world market and technology leader in the area of industrial lasers and laser systems. With 60 subsidiaries in more than 26 countries, TRUMPF Group has about 8,000 employees and generates sales in excess of $2.28 billion. TRUMPF Inc., headquartered in Farmington, Conn., is the North American subsidiary of TRUMPF GmbH +Co. KG, and with approximately 700 employees is the largest subsidiary within the TRUMPF Group and is one of the largest manufacturers of fabricating machinery in the U.S. TRUMPF Inc. is dedicated to serving the American, Canadian and Mexican market needs of fabricating machinery, OEM laser and laser marking. TRUMPF’s Laser Technology Center in Plymouth, Mich., is part of TRUMPF Inc. The Laser Technology Center specializes in pulsed and continuous wave (cw) solid-state lasers and CO2 lasers for multi-axis laser systems, stand-alone and integrated OEM lasers.

Company History

The company was founded in 1923 when Christian Trumpf and two partners acquired Julius Geiger GmbH, a machine shop in Stuttgart, Germany that made flexible shafts for dental and printing uses. In 1957, TRUMPF patented the coordinate guidance system for metal sheets, which was the starting point for the NC controller for the laser machine.

TRUMPF’s presence in North America is the result of an enterprising young design engineer, Berthold Leibinger, who was convinced the company should open an office in a country where the market was still untapped for TRUMPF machine tools. He persuaded the company’s president to let him travel to the U.S. and the result was the launch of the location in Farmington in 1969. Due to his foresight and ingenuity, Professor Leibinger became president and managing partner of the TRUMPF Group, a privatelyowned, family-operated business. Today, his children and son-inlaw now serve as the TRUMPF Group’s senior management team.

Today’s Company

As a company, TRUMPF holds significant industry patents and dedicates about 10 percent of its sales revenue to research and development initiatives. Last year, about $212 million was spent on R&D. These investments of time and money are making huge impacts on today’s industries.

“One of the most dramatic impacts on sheet metal welding is the development of remote welding technologies. TRUMPF’s TruDisk laser combined with our PFO (programmable focusing optic) is the optimum solution for this application. The high power and high beam quality of the TruDisk combined with the precision high speed optical beam positioning of the PFO allow cycle times for laser welding to be dramatically decreased. One welding on-the-fly robot equipped with a TruDisk laser does the work of three to four conventional laser welding robots, and up to 10 resistance spot welding robots. We see remote welding as one of the fastest growing application segments in a variety of industries,” said TRUMPF Manager of Products and Applications David Havrilla.

“The industry continues to demand further improvements in laser reliability and quick field repair along with reduction of scheduled maintenance requirements. In response, the latest product releases from TRUMPF take all of these principles to a higher level. All products from the TruMicro nano-second and pico-second pulsed lasers to the TruDisk CW lasers incorporate a robust construction with a totally modular design, long life diodes, tele-diagnostics and are fully field repairable, and in most cases field upgradable in terms of power and the number of fiber outputs,” said Havrilla.

TRUMPF is also staying on top of other trends. According to Timothy Morris, general manager of TRUMPF’s Laser Technology Center, “In the last five years, we have seen significant growth in the use of hot-formed steels for automotive body construction. As a result of the difficulty in trimming these materials with conventional methods due to the hardness, the use of our TruLaser Cell 7000 series multi-axis cutting systems has expanded dramatically. In previous years these were traditionally supplied with CO2 lasers. However, with the advancement of high-powered solid-state lasers, particularly the TRUMPF TruDisk, the trend is now moving to solid-state lasers for these systems.”

For more information, visit www.us.trumpf.com.