MATERIALS PREPARATION | TECHNOLOGY
customers,” says Peter Dal Bo, Group Chief Com- mercial Officer. “Other trends driving new develop- ments in drying include the need for high flexibility, reduced productions runs, rapid injection moulding machine set-up and avoiding mistakes in quick changeovers of materials and moulds. The princi- ples of Industry 4.0 are also the basis for the design of new drying systems and resin handling, meaning the compilation of raw data received from the machines and the interconnection of all devices. “In this scenario, it is necessary to provide drying systems that can automatically adjust the drying parameters to meet variable conditions in terms of the material to be dried and throughput. It is also critical to have instruments for material traceability and to avoid mistakes in raw material distribution. In automotive factories, for example, the request is not for more simple dryers, but complete systems that can be integrated with a customer’s ERP or MES, providing aggregated data for analysis, quality checks and actions for efficiency improvement.” In order to meet these requirements, Piovan has developed the Modula, a fully automatic multi-hop- per drying system that can adapt itself to variable working conditions. Each drying hopper is equipped with load cells or with a continuous level sensor in order to detect the real throughput requirement to the drying system. The system can adjust all drying parameters, including air flow due to a frequency converter on the process blower and automatic modulating valves on each hopper, combined with a proprietary air flowmeter. In addition, the tempera- ture and dew point of the process air is controlled through the DewPoint stabiliser. Residence time is controlled by adjusting the level in the hopper to meet the real production target. The system can be complemented with Easylink+, the automatic coupling station that ensures that all hoppers are fed with the correct material, and with the Material Tracking System (MTS) – the new feature of Winfactory (WF) 4.0. The MTS tracks each resin batch along the production line from storage silo to the injection moulding machine and reports show when a batch of raw material is received by a specific destination, for example an injection moulding machine. The data can be filtered by destination, date or material or production batch, and exported for further customer analysis. “Future developments will be an even higher level of integration between drying and automatic feeding
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systems in order to have error-proof systems,” Dal Bo adds. “Drying systems will be required to be automatically adaptive to variable working condi- tions, maintaining a high level of efficiency. There will also be an increased need for machines and supervising systems that can record, manage and make data available for advance analysis about energy and material consumption, machine performance and traceability of raw materials.” According to the UK supplier and distribu-
tor of plastics ancillary equipment Summit Systems, the majority of the plastics industry remains extremely conscious about energy consumption when it comes to drying. “Historically, it has been an expensive process,” says Jason Culleton, Technical Sales Engineer. “The biggest influences are energy and time, and everyone is working hard to miminise them. This is where we have found that one product that we distribute in the United Kingdom – the Maguire Vacuum Batch Dryer (VBD) – comes into its own. It dries plastic material six times faster than conventional dryers, at 85% less energy use. For example, polycarbonate would take four hours to dry. With the same material going through a VBD at the same throughput, there are significant benefits in terms of running costs, better quality mouldings and cost per kilo.” Controlling moisture is increasingly important.
“Aesthetic and technical engineering products have to be tightly controlled in moisture terms with very tight parameters,” Culleton adds. “You have to ensure everything follows a set procedure to keep consistency, otherwise you get huge amounts of scrap. The plastics sector is becoming more demanding, in particular with more material blends being created. “We are getting great results with vacuum drying because it creates fewer issues with the polymer. This results in better quality components. With material under much less intense heat, there is less stress on the material which minimises scrap. The VBD is extremely fast drying technology, which uses a vacuum and no desiccant. It is ideal for optical, medical and technical applications.” Summit Systems adds that R&D
Leverage in the UK has been trialling a Maguire LPD200 for the application of PET in injection stretch blow moulding and the company reports
March 2019 | INJECTION WORLD 43
Above: The Maguire Vacuum Batch Dryer (VBD)
Left: The Plug & Dry from Eisbär is an all-in-one material drying system for low material throughputs
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