news | Arburg technology days Kraibühler bows out after 50 years


Arburg managing director of technology Herbert Kraibüh- ler handed over to successor Heinz Gaub after the Technol- ogy Days event, ending his 50 years with the firm. Chris Smith spoke to both about past and future innovations


The 2014 Technology Days event marked a further milestone in Arburg’s corpo- rate history as the last to be overseen by long-serving managing director of technol- ogy and engineering Herbert Kraibühler, who retired and passed over his role to Heinz Gaub on 1 April. Kraibühler’s 50-year career with Arburg began in 1964, when he joined the Lossburg company as a machine fitter. He went on to study engineer- ing and plastics technology under an Arburg scholarship scheme at Karlsruhe, joining the company’s development department in 1972 and working his way up to the post of managing director of technology in 1996. As the company’s technical and engineering head for close to two decades, Kraibühler steered Arburg through some big technology shifts. “One of the biggest was the change from hydraulic to electric machines,” he told Injection World. “In hydraulics, it is all pistons and cylinders. For the electric machines we had to change to toggle systems and spindles. From our side, that was an important point in the focus of what we could buy and what we could make.” Kraibühler lead the


company’s development of its 14


Retiring Arburg technical director Herbert Kraibühler (left) in conversation with his successor Heinz Gaub pictured during a walk around the Arburg factory


patented – and own-manufac- tured – spindle system and the recruitment of the many drive engineers that the electric technology called for. He also led development of the Selogica control system, which he said he considered to be ahead of its time and its competitors. “The basic principle of Selogica is not so far away from the mobile phones and apps we see today,” he says. Few people today can match


Kraibühler’s long career with just one company. The man who takes over his role, Heinz Gaub, has already held posts in a number of firms - most of them medium-sized, interna- tionally-active family-owned businesses such as Arburg. He studied engineering at the Technical University of Berlin and gained an MSc from the


INJECTION WORLD | April 2014


Massachussetts Institute of Technology in the US. Gaub joined Arburg nine months ago and has been working closely with Kraibüh- ler in the run up to the handover. He is already prepared to share his ideas of what developments may lie ahead. “Over the course of the next years we will certainly see a lot of developments in controls and drives in terms of speed, technical performance and in terms of the human machine interface,” says Gaub. “If you look at machine operation in general – plastics or anywhere – it requires a lot of experts. Future develop- ments will provide more expert technical help to the operator.” Gaub cites the Freeformer


additive build system as an example of how machines may develop. “The only button [on


the Freeformer] is the on-off switch. Everything else is phone-style. In some respects, the Freeformer is a technology driver for us – it shows the difference.” Arburg’s introduction of the


Freeformer at the K show last year surprised many that see additive manufacturing as a potential threat to injection moulding. Gaub, however, agrees with his predecessor that it is a natural addition to the company’s injection moulding machinery activities. “It is a new core technology but the technical philosophy is close to what we use on our injection moulding machines. The plastification is the same, the only difference is that we are shooting very small amounts one hundred times a second,” he says. ❙ www.arburg.com


www.injectionworld.com


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