At the Swiss Plastics Expo held from 17 to 19 January, the Wittmann Group, represented by Battenfeld (Schweiz) AG and Wittmann Kunststofftechnik AG, will present to trade visitors in hall 2, booth No. A 2000, a fully integrated injection molding cell producing bio building blocks, as well as its latest developments in the areas of robots and auxiliary equipment.
On an EcoPower 110/350 with the new B8X control system, laid out as an Insider cell, a bio building block will be manufactured from Fasal using an 8-cavity mold supplied by Bioblo, Austria. Fasal is a compound made by Fasal Wood GmbH, Austria, from wood flour and post-industrial polypropylene supplied by Borealis, Austria. The equipment is designed as an Insider cell, which includes a W918 robot and an S-Max 3 screenless granulator from Wittmann, a conveyor belt and also the protective housing all integrated in the production system.
The system is completed by a Gravimax G14 blender and an Aton plus 120 desiccant wheel dryer. The robot and all Wittmann auxiliary appliances can be programmed and operated via the machine’s B8X control system. This offers a number of advantages, such as the options of simplified machine start-up, simplified data management (with joint backup of the mold data, appliance settings and robot program) and synchronization of movements for cycle optimization.
The molded parts and the sprue are removed by the W918 robot, and the sprue is passed on directly to the granulator, where it is ground and then returned to the process without being dried again. The finished parts are deposited on the integrated conveyor belt and can be taken home by trade fair visitors. To ensure top quality for the parts, the software packages HiQ Metering for active closing of the check valve and HiQ Melt for measuring the MFI are used in addition to HiQ Flow. The resulting MFR (melt flow rate) is an indicator of the material’s flow attributes.
