Engel and partners: lean and environmentally friendly
Engel's green machines and system solutions will not only be displayed at the machine manufacturer's own stands at Fakuma 2014: seven partner companies will be using Engel systems to showcase their own innovations, including the Kunststoff-Institut Lüdenscheid, Ehlebracht Kunststoff-Technik and ROS.The Kunststoff-Institut Lüdenscheid will be demonstrating tie-bar-less production at stand 5312 in hall A5. An Engel victory 200/50 spex injection moulding machine will be used to produce business card boxes using the thermoplastic foam injection molding process. With this application, the Kunststoff-Institut Lüdenscheid will present a passive Greenmold concept that works without an additional active heat source and can fully suppress the formation of streaks even at approximate mould wall temperatures of 60°C. Greenmold is a self-regulating system for variothermal processes that combines advanced energy efficiency with high standards of component surface quality.
Ehlebracht Kunststoff-Technik, a company based in Enger, Germany, will use an Engel victory 200/50 injection moulding machine to demonstrate the highly economic production of surface-finished plastic parts in hall A1 (stand A1-1205). Together with partner exhibitors pi4_robotics (Berlin, Germany) and Impact Coatings (Linköping, Sweden), the company will show how the injection moulding process, surface finishing and handling (including quality assurance) can be integrated in an efficient and space-saving manner. Parts with complex, three-dimensional structures will be manufactured in an interlinked process. Following injection moulding, an Engel viper robot will remove the plastic components and place them on a conveyor belt; the parts will then pass to a humanoid pi4_workerbot with integrated visual inspection system from pi4_robotics. Following an initial quality test, the robot will place the parts in a PlastiCoater 200 PVD metallisation unit supplied by Impact Coatings to provide the plastic components with a chrome coating. The humanoid robot will then remove the parts, which will be subjected to a further quality check before the finished products are placed, again automatically, on a packaging tray. Inline coating enables the highly integrated manufacturing cell to set new standards of efficiency in the production of metallised plastic products while helping to reduce the risk involved with chrome compounds significantly.
ROS, a company based in Coburg, Germany, will focus on precise moulding for particularly complex component geometry. An all-electric Engel e-motion 200/110 injection moulding machine with integrated Engel viper 12 robot will produce impellers for use in automobile coolant pumps in hall A5 (stand A5-5104). The aim in developing this component, which won the TecPart prize for innovation in 2013, was to achieve high pump capacity with very small component sizes. Various methods were combined to enable the demoulding of extreme undercuts; amongst other things, the slide units follow two overlapping circular tracks.
