How many times can a mast be rolled and unrolled?
We design Bi-stable Reeled Composites to give a cycle life that is appropriate to the application. We can make single cycle life products and products that roll 1000’s of times…it all depends what the application requires, and what the end user requires. Like any expeditionary mast product, Rolatube masts cannot be used indefinitely without some type of degradation. We have been supplying our Bi-stable Reeled Composite masts into the military and industrial sectors for over 20 years, and we are confident that our composite designs have been optimised to meet lifetime requirements of the user communities.
What Environmental Standards are your masts built to?
To ensure our Military products are fit for purpose in the field, we have developed our mast systems to comply with the relevant clauses of MILSTD810G.
In order to offer the Industrial Range at a lower price point, the industrial range of products have had a value engineering exercise completed on them, such that they do not comply with all the relevant clauses of MILSTD810G, but remain perfectly fit for purpose within the Industrial sector.
If a customer’s application is going to be exposed to extreme environmental conditions, we would always ask that the Rolatube Technical team is consulted before, and specification is signed off.
What Top Loads can the Rolatube Masts take?
The maximum top loads will vary from mast to mast and these loads are quoted in the product Data Sheets, our brochures and on our website. It should be noted that the maximum top load is established around a safe deployment and recovery loading, not what the mast could take when it is fully deployed and correctly guyed into place.
If you have any questions about the top load capability of our products, our technical team will always be available to advise.
How do I find out if a Bi-stable Reeled Composite can work for my application?
It all starts with making contact with us at Rolatube. We will have an initial application evaluation discussion to understand if our technology has the ability to meet your technical and commercial targets. This conversation can be held under an NDA if required. If the initial assessment looks good then we would move to discussing the shape of how a prototype system could be provided to you.
What sizes do you make the Bi-stable Reeled Composite in?
We don’t have a catalogue of standard tube products or a warehouse full of them! There is an infinite range of composite combinations that we can use, all of them creating different performance parameters for the resulting tube. For this reason we design the Bi-stable Reeled Composite for the application that is using them. As the business has grown, we have increasingly found that composites designed for a particular application can be repurposed for a new application, but we always make the products to order rather than holding stock. At the moment our smallest commercially available Rolatube is 32mm diameter and the largest is 100mm diameter.
What are your Bi-stable Reeled Composites made from?
We manufacture our Bi-stable Reeled Composites from a range of different raw materials, all depending on the application the product is being used for. By way of example, the majority of our mast systems are manufactured from a glass reinforced polypropylene composite, whereas our products for the space sector are manufactured from a carbon fibre/epoxy composite product.
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