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ary. Last year it completed the construction of an enlarged warehouse at Shanghai in China, allowing it to offer machines from stock to shorten lead times for its growing number of Chinese customers. The company has also
committed to a six figure investment in a 30% expansion of its solar power generating capacity at its Lossburg plant. Arburg already produces around 30% of its annual energy requirements via a combination of CHP, wind and photovoltaics. Hehl said expansion of this side of its activities is one of its key goals for the future. Arburg expects its final 2013
result to amount to around €470m, according to Heinson.
That is a little lower than its record result of €488m in 2012, which he attributes largely to customer delays. “Some large projects were delayed into 2014 and will be invoiced later, it is not a drop-back in incoming orders,” he said. The 2013 result was helped by a big improvement in the US, which is now Arburg’s largest export market. “The US market has developed well. In 2009 it was about 1,200
machines, now it is around 3,600. We feel that the industry in the US is winning back work from the lower cost countries. And we see the same now in the UK,” said Heinson, who predicts a “very good and solid” 2014 result.
Processing flexibility The 40 or so processing exhibits running across the Lossburg site covered a wide range of applications. Some, such as the thermoplastic composite sheet overmoulding of an automotive seat lever on a 400 tonne Allrounder 820s machine equipped with the company’s direct LFT compounding technology, had been demon- strated at the K fair last year. Others were new for the event. Among the new exhibits was a multi-layer production system for thick polycarbonate LED lenses. The system was running on an all-electric 150 tonne Allrounder 520A equipped with two injection units using a Wilhelm Weber rotary tool that rotated by increments of 45˚between eight stations – three injection, four cooling and one removal. The process involved injection of a preform at the first
Arburg applied Industry 4.0 techniques to production of this toy car, capturing and storing all production data against a unique QR code
station, followed by indexing through three cooling stations, overmoulding of the second layer at the fifth station, cooling at the sixth station, overmoulding of a third layer at the seventh station, then part removal – while the mould was closed – at the eighth station. This reduced cycle time from around 180s using conventional technology to 55s, according to Arburg.
This thick section LED lens was produced in an 8-station Wilhem Weber rotary mould on a 150 tonne all-electric Allrounder on a 55s cycle
12 INJECTION WORLD | April 2014
Internet of Things Production efficiency is not only a matter of machine and mould technology, however, and engineers in the com- pany’s Efficiency Centre had put together a demonstration production cell to show how the internet may change plastics production in the future. Industry 4.0 is a German government-backed programme intended to develop strategies for smart manufacturing based on “The Internet of Things” concept of full connectivity. The exhibit itself was the
relatively mundane manufac- turing of a simple toy car - the technology was the hidden data collection. Each visitor was able to ‘identify’ their car by a simple scan of their visitor badge, which then pro- grammed a laser to place a unique QR code on the moulding immediately after removal from the moulding machine. Every process parameter and quality check – in this case machine data, validations of correct assembly and function of the finished car – were assigned to that part and stored in a central computer system. “We are manufacturing a part that is collecting data throughout the process – and it is all stored,” said Dr Thomas Walther, head of Arburg’s Application Centre. “This is data integration at the highest intelligence level. If this was a safety critical part for the automotive industry, for example, this would be really valuable.” ❙
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