Maximum precision for very small and sensitive parts
The requirement in manufacturing safety needle holders is maximum moulding precision. The filigree polystyrene parts have a single shot weight of just 0.08 g, but still have a complex structure with changing wall thicknesses. They are designed with a predetermined breaking point that makes it impossible to use disposable syringes multiple times.
Fluctuations in the injection moulding process immediately lead to rejects. To prevent this, the ENGEL e-victory 170/80 injection moulding machine is equipped with two smart assistance systems. One of them is iQ weight control, which autonomously detects fluctuations in the melt volume and material viscosity and compensates for them in the same shot. And the other is iQ flow control, which ensures constant temperature control conditions by automatically adjusting the temperature differences in the cooling water manifold circuit.
On top of this, the excellent parallelism of the mould mounting platens on the e-victory machine's tie-bar-less clamping unit ensure great process consistency. The patented force dividers make sure that the parallelism is also reliably maintained during clamping force build-up and injection and that the clamp force is uniformly distributed across the mould mounting platens.
Because there are no tie bars in the way, the mould mounting platens can be fully used up to their very edges. This means that the large 16-cavity mould by Fostag Formenbau (Switzerland) fits on a relatively small injection moulding machine with a clamp force of 800 kN. This keeps the machine footprint, the capital expenditure and the operating costs low.
The e-victory on show at Plastimagen is equipped with an ENGEL viper 12 linear robot that transfers the needle holders to an integrated pipe distribution system. The small moulded parts are packed in bags separated by cavity in a fully automated process to support batch tracking right through to the level of individual cavities. The pipe distributor developed by ENGEL is made entirely of stainless steel and contributes towards reducing particulate emissions in the cleanroom.
