packaging | Innovation
deceleration of mould opening and closing movements with a resulting lower cycle times. The company has gradually been extending the Full Electric
range upwards and now offers a
fully electric and directly driven Euromap 7000 size injection unit, a typical size required for 700 and 850 tonne packaging machines. Sumitomo (SHI) Demag continues to
Above: Sumitomo Demag has delivered 2,000 El-Exis
machines over the past 15 years. It says the latest SP variant includes improved energy
management features
Right: This
inection stretch blow moulded bottle was
produced at K2016 on an Engel all-elec- tric injection machine with an 8+8+8+8
cavity Foboha cube mould
prolonging the cycle time. Engel also used K2016 to show a novel cube mould
application - integrated injection blow moulding. Back in 2012, Engel demonstrated injection stretch blow moulding using 2+2 cavity tooling developed with Italian mouldmaker Cantoni. However, the company says the shuttle-based system – it called it Inject2Blow – could not readily be scaled up to high-cavitation tooling. This latest cube mould development with Foboha and Austrian packaging producer Alpla could be upscaled to as many as 96 cavities without compromising cycle time or accuracy, Engel claims. The K demonstration used an all-electric e-Motion 740/220 T WP injection moulding machine to produce 8g PP containers in an 8+8+8+8 cavity “proof-of-principle” prototype cube mould. The containers are part of a development by Alpla for a customer in Asia that until now packages its products in glass. A switch to plastics will reduce both production cost and packaging weight while increasing consumer safety. In the cube system, short cycle times
are achieved by blowing the previously moulded preforms in the opposite mould position and in tandem with injection moulding. Simultaneously, an integrated Easix six-axis robot removes the finished containers from the fourth position and places them on a conveyor with the opening facing upwards. An insulating cover over the second mould position maintains the correct preform temperature prior to blowing using technology from Bauer Compressors .
Direct electric drives Italian machine maker BMB has long promoted the benefit of direct electric drive for packaging applications, citing reduced energy consumption and noise levels together with improved precision and cleanliness. It claims that its eKW-Pi Full Electric series of injection machines, which use direct drive technology with energy recovery on all axes, achieve much better performance than hydraulic alternatives in terms of acceleration and
36 INJECTION WORLD | January/February 2017
develop its El-Exis SP machines, which use a hybrid drive technology to deliver dynamics the company claims are optimised for fast cycle thin wall packaging applications. Available for more than 15 years, two examples of the latest version of the machines were shown at K last year, offering improved energy manage- ment features and an OPC-UA interface for Industry 4.0 application. Both were, according to the machine maker, among the fastest machines running across the exhibition halls. A 200 tonne El-Exis SP 200 model was producing IML cups using a Brink mould and automa- tion on a cycle time of less than 2s; a 420 tonne El-Exis SP 420 was producing PP trays on a 2+2 stack mould using an injection compression moulding cycle. The company claims to have around 2,000 El-Exis SP machines in the market today. Food packag- ing producer Franz Henke installed its first El-Exis model at its plant at Lohne in 2008 and now has more than 15 models, some in IML applications. The company also operates Sumitomo Demag IntElect machines, as well as some Systec hydraulic machines. According to the company, the power used by the electric machines has been more than halved compared to the hydraulic models they replaced while output has increased. It cites an
output increase of 20% for one of the El-Exis projects, production of lids for baby food containers.
Click on the links for more information: ❙
www.husky.co ❙
www.wittmann-group.com ❙
www.kraussmaffei.com ❙
www.arburg.com ❙
www.foboha.com ❙
www.engelglobal.com ❙
www.cantoni.biz ❙
www.bauercomp.com ❙
www.bmb-spa.com ❙
www.sumitomo-shi-demag.eu ❙
www.brinkbv.com
www.injectionworld.com
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