Development History of Metal Bellows

Metal bellows is the device to absorb shock, compensate displacement, seal, and connect pipeline, has been widely used for automatic control and measuring meter, vacuum technique, mechanical industry, electric power, transportation and atomic energy industry. When does people invent the metallic bellows? How does metallic bellows been invented? Let’s follow Henan Lanphan to get to know the development history of metal bellows.

Metallic Bellows

At first, people sew the animal hide into tubular structure to adapt the needs of production and war. After a long long time, till the late 17th century, Dutch people produced the first longitudinal stylolitic canvas hose, widely used in fire control. Later, rubber appeared in international market and rubber hose is popular at that time. While in some corrosive medium and high or low temperature medium can not be delivered by rubber hose, and then people successfully made corrugation on metal pipe, the metallic bellows comes into being.

In the year of 1855, Germany firstly obtained the patent of metal bellows manufacturing, which make use of the principle of manufacturing jewelry. 30 years later, E.Levavasseur from France and H.Witzenmann from Germany created a new type metal bellows and obtained patent in 1885. This new type spiral metal bellows has better sealing performance, and this model structure has been second improved in 1894, which enables a more balanced stress state.

In the year of 1929, people finally made whole structure metal bellows by pinchbecl alloy materials. Form 1950s, double layer, three layer metallic bellows appear, the manufacturing technology changed quickly: welding, electroforming, hydraulic pressure and mechanical flow forming. Meanwhile, the diameters expands a wide range from 2mm to 500mm, or even larger, corrugation number is up to thousands.

Technology improves society to develop in a rapid speed, maybe metallic bellows will step into a higher grade in the near future.