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Company
Flow is the world leader in the development and manufacture of ultrahigh-pressure (UHP) waterjet technology, and a leading provider of robotics and assembly equipment. Flow provides technologically advanced, environmentally-sound solutions to the manufacturing and industrial cleaning markets.
Flow's roots date back to the early 1970s, when former research scientists from Boeing founded Flow Research. Their mission was to develop new businesses based on advanced technologies. The first technology commercialized by that company was the use of an ultrahigh-pressure waterjet as an industrial cutting tool. Flow later invented, patented, and perfected the world's first abrasive waterjet system to cut hard materials up to 12 inches thick.
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Flow Corporate Headquarters
Kent, Washington
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Since 1974, Flow has delivered more than 8,500 waterjet and abrasive waterjet systems to customers in more than 45 countries. With nearly 60% worldwide market share, Flow is the world leader in the development and manufacture of UHP waterjet technology. With its Corporate Headquarters in Kent, Washington, Flow now employs more than 700 employees in offices in Indiana, Michigan, Canada, Brazil, Germany, UK, Sweden, Spain, Italy, France, Taiwan, Japan, and China. Today, the company's core markets have grown to include aerospace, automotive, job and machine shops, paper, food, art and architecture, industrial cleaning, food processing and other specialty applications. Flow's global preeminence can be attributed to its focus on key areas including technology leadership, providing total systems solutions, new product development through extensive research and development, expanding applications within core markets and an unrelenting focus on customer success through system reliability and worldwide technical support from the largest service team focused on waterjet and ultrahigh-pressure technology in the world.
The History of Waterjets
Dr. Norman Franz has long been regarded as the father of the waterjet. A forestry engineer who wanted to find new ways to slice thick trees into lumber, Dr. Franz was the first person to study the use of ultrahigh-pressure (UHP) water as a cutting tool in the 1950s. To create an ultrahigh-pressure effect, Dr. Franz dropped heavy weights onto columns of water, forcing that water through a tiny orifice. He obtained short bursts of very high pressures, in some cases pressures higher than what is currently being used. From these bursts of high pressures, Dr. Franz found that he could cut wood and other materials. His later studies involved more continuous streams of water, but he found it difficult to obtain continuous high pressures. In addition, component life of the cutting tool was measured in minutes — not weeks or months as it is today. Though Dr. Franz never made a production lumber cutter, his research and findings were used and significantly enhanced by Flow International to develop and produce pure waterjet cutting machines. A most significant contribution made by Flow in these early days (1970) was the development of a highly reliable intensifier pump. This enabled the first major application for this technology to be commercialized for cutting disposable diapers.
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Dr. Mohamed Hashish
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In 1979, Flow began researching methods to increase the cutting power of the waterjet so it could cut metals, and other hard materials. Dr. Mohamed Hashish, regarded as the father of the abrasive waterjet, invented the process of adding abrasives to the plain waterjet. He used garnet abrasives, a material commonly used on sandpaper. With this method, the waterjet (containing abrasives) could cut virtually any material. In 1980, abrasive-waterjets were used for the first time to cut steel, glass, and concrete. In 1983, Flow sold the world's first commercial abrasive waterjet cutting system for automotive glass. The first adopters of the technology were primarily in the aviation and space industries which found the waterjet a perfect tool for cutting high strength materials such as Inconel, stainless steel, and titanium as well as high strength light-weight composites such as carbon fiber composites used on military aircraft and now used on commercial airplanes. Since then, abrasive waterjets have been introduced into many other industries such as job-shop, stone, tile, glass, jet engine, construction, nuclear, and shipyard, to name a few.
Until 1986, UHP technology was relegated to factory and laboratory environments. In that year the world's first mobile ultrahigh-pressure waterjet pumping system was introduced for mobile and field applications such as industrial cleaning, roadway maintenance, and infrastructure refurbishment projects. Shortly thereafter, mobile waterjets had their brush with fame, when in 1987 a system from Flow was used to extract "Baby Jessica," from the abandoned well she fell into as a toddler. The waterjet system was used to dig a parallel shaft and then break through the wall of well.
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Flow's Dynamic Waterjet
Cuts with Speed & Precision
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Throughout the late '80s and 1990s, waterjet technology found ever expanding applications and increasing acceptance. As the technology continued to grow and mature, it has become one of the fastest growing machine tool technologies over the past 5 years. In 2002, Flow developed the Dynamic Waterjet® which allowed the technology to cut materials faster, more precisely, and without taper, thereby overcoming a major shortcoming and increasing its suitability for an even wider range of applications. Ironically, the wood cutting application that Dr. Franz first researched in the early days is now just a minor application for UHP technology. Today, UHP waterjet technology is used to cut and machine a wide range of materials for a variety of industries. Everything from aluminum for boats, to composites for sporting goods, to fabric and plastics used for automotive interiors, and even granite for kitchen countertops is cut with the waterjet. Industrial cleaning applications include ship hulls, oil storage tanks, roadways, jet engines, and even automotive car carriers. And, as UHP technology continues to evolve, new applications and uses for it will also develop.
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