Industry competence in action

With the production of 40-pole connector housings made of glass-fibre reinforced PBT, during the exhibition ENGEL will demonstrate how highest demands on precision can be combined with economic efficiency. In this market segment, due to the very filigree structure inside the connector housing, the competitiveness of the producer is defined by the precision of the injection moulding process. In several sequential process steps, the connector housings are equipped with stabiliser inserts, gaskets and contacts, then laser inscribed. Imprecisely injected areas or warping will impede the automated assembly and may lead to a halt in production. Since injection errors often are not detected until the end of the process chain, rejects also become more costly. To prevent this, the e-mac machine makes sure that very thin-walled areas are filled, even across long flow paths.

With the intelligent assistance systems from ENGEL's inject 4.0 programme, the already very reliable e-mac machines are also perfectly equipped for process fluctuations through external influences. Three iQ products are installed on the exhibition machine: iQ weight control, which maintains constant melt volume and adjusts fluctuations in the environmental conditions and the raw material, iQ clamp control, which continuously adjusts clamping force based on the mould breathing, and the new iQ flow control for the needs-based regulation of the temperature control units. iQ weight control was the first of the iQ systems, and was introduced to the market five years ago. It has already become very well-established in the production of connectors, because in this segment with its especially filigree component structures, process fluctuations are one of the main causes of rejects. iQ weight control is a reliable aid in preventing production-related rejects.

Medical: Maximum integration with a minimal footprint

Highly integrated, compact production cells minimise the system footprint and increase area productivity. These aspects really pay off in the cleanroom. For this reason, ENGEL redeveloped the stainless steel pipe distributor for the cavity specific handling of small injection moulding parts, which it introduced two years ago, so that the handling system now fits completely into the expanded safety gate of the injection moulding machine. This new, extremely compact solution will be presented for the first time at the Fakuma.

During the five days of the fair, an ENGEL e-victory170/80 injection moulding machine will be producing needle holders for 1-ml safety syringes in a 16-cavity mould by Fostag Formenbau (Stein am Rhein, Switzerland). An ENGEL viper 12 linear robot will remove the filigree polystyrene parts from the mould and transfer them to the distribution system. In order to ensure batch traceability down to the level of individual cavities, the injection moulded parts will be packed in cavity-specific bags. For this purpose, 16 bags are hung in a cart located directly beneath the pipe distributor. Individual shots can be extracted for quality control purposes.

For unmanned cleanroom operation – during the night-shift, for example – two carts can be alternated in sequence, with a buffering system enabling the fully automated switch. The entire periphery for this is integrated into the CC300 control unit of the injection moulding machine. Thanks to shared data storage, the CC300 can precisely coordinate the movements of the machine and the robot with each other, thus optimising overall efficiency. In addition to this, there are also especially short robot paths due to the tie-bar-less clamping unit of the e-victory machine. In this application, both of these factors contribute to the short cycle times of six seconds.

So that the machine can also be flexibly used for other products, ENGEL designed the pipe distributor and the bag-packing cart as a fixed unit. This can be easily moved back and forth, ensuring full accessibility of the mould area.