Portable Tube Bender Streamlines Metal Conduit Installation
Jaison Patel, E’22, mechanical engineering, and Joshua Baum, E’23, mechanical engineering, co-founded startup Tubender to make tube bending for metal conduits an affordable and efficient process. Their technology is based on a prototype created during their senior engineering capstone.
This article originally appeared on Northeastern Global News. It was published by Alena Kuzub. Main photo: Jaison Patel and Joshua Baum, both graduates of the College of Engineering, work full-time on developing a portable tube-bending machine. Photo by Matthew Modoono/Northeastern University
Northeastern grads engineer tube-bending prototypes to streamline electricians’ work
Electricians install metal conduit in buildings every day to protect electrical wiring from damage and mitigate fire hazards.
As they route the wiring, electricians need to bend the conduit, but there are no quick and easy solutions to do this on site. They can use a manual tube bender or a simple-powered device to make a single bend at a time—or they can ship the conduit to a prefabrication shop that bends and cuts it to specification.
These approaches are inefficient and wasteful, say Jaison Patel and Joshua Baum, mechanical engineers and recent Northeastern University graduates, who are working to bring a programmable and portable tube-bending machine to market.
Their startup company that is developing the machine is called Tubender. The original prototype, which creates multiple bends on a continuous length of tubing, was created as a senior capstone engineering project.
“You get to program in all of the bends that you want to do in the tube,” Patel says. “You start the program, and it creates all those bends in one go, so you don’t have to keep readjusting the tube. There’s a lot less room for error.”
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The programmable Tubender machine can bend a continuous length of tubing multiple times and fits on the back of a pickup truck. Photos by Matthew Modoono/Northeastern University
Metal tubing has a lot of applications, Patel says. In the future, he says, their machine can potentially be used in other fields, such as by the automotive, aerospace, architecture, furniture, building or shipbuilding industries.
“We can currently already bend copper, aluminum and steel [tubes]. We’re not really limited on the material,” he says.
The first prototype was created by Patel and four other engineering students in the fall of 2022. After they completed the capstone project, most of the students moved on. But Patel saw potential in the idea beyond the classroom and pursued it as a business.
Patel met Baum, a 2023 Northeastern mechanical engineering graduate, through a mutual friend, and together they co-founded Tubender.
“Jaison has been shifting more into the business development role and running the whole operations of the company,” Baum says. “That’s why he brought me on to take care of the technical side.”
In reality, both are doing a little bit of everything, he says, as there is a lot to do at this stage of their business.
The partners decided to focus on targeting commercial electricians.
Read Full Story at Northeastern Global News