Key takeaways:
- Sumitomo (SHI) Demag has launched a fully integrated digital feature, activeMeltControl (aMC), to compensate for melt viscosity variations in nearly all applications and materials, including recycled plastics.
- This technology helps reduce reject rates, improves process consistency and machine uptime, enhancing productivity and sustainability.
- The greater manufacturing flexibility allows for more post-consumer and post-industrial recycled material types.
Jules Selmes 2016
Sumitomo (SHI) Demag has pursued activeMeltControl for four years before unveiling it at the European roadshow. Fully integrated into the company's IntElect machine control system, this game-changing feature automatically adapts to the injection moulding process.
Once it identifies that some parameters are drifting towards the tolerance limits set by the user, it automatically amends them to compensate for the variation. The adjustment bandwidth is also defined by the processor.
The need for this new technology stems from the ever-changing quality of plastics, with fewer virgin materials and more recyclable content. As the company’s Product Manager for Digital Solutions, Dr. Thomas Schilling, explains "Many customers have requested a digital solution to compensate for these variations when manufacturing precision parts using our highly efficient all-electric machines. That's why we introduced aMC as a completely independent software module that complements our established active modules".
"With aMC, we can now automatically adapt to melt viscosity variations in nearly all applications and materials. These variations may be due to batch fluctuations, recyclables, regrind, drying differences, dosing variations, or the use of additional additives," adds Area Sales Manager Ashlee Gough.
For example, the software can correct variations in the melt flow index (MFI) in 100% recycled material. This makes the process as stable and effective as it would be if virgin materials were used.
As Isy Ferguson, Managing Director at Hardie Polymers, notes, “Some of the challenges of running a reprocessed material in comparison to a virgin polymer material is these need to be manually adapted and played with during processing. The introduction of technologies like aMC allows processors to monitor the melt flow of material throughout a batch which enables adjustments to be made automatically rather than being manually controlled by a setter”.
aMC only sets the limits for holding pressure and switch over position, making it suitable in all industries. Other benefits include better process consistency, longer machine uptime and lower scrap, which improve productivity and sustainability.
It is available either as an optional extra on the company's IntElect 2 machine series or retrofitted to older machines.