TECHNOLOGY | RECYCLING
Above: Plasmac’s Alpha 70 granulator
tool-less access to the cutting chamber for maintenance and cleaning; and great flexibility to adapt the core of most machines to various infeed systems, cutting-chamber geometries, and evacuation requirements.
Growing understanding “I believe that the great innovation in the Viper line was to combine and build in many smaller innova- tions and improvements that might have been added-cost options before,” Miller says. “We’ve found that there are a growing minority
of customers who really understand and appreciate the integral role of size reduction equipment to their operations. To them, a granulator or shredder isn’t just a machine that you run until it quits. And these are the customers who have been pushing us to take the basic configuration of the Viper granula- tors — the motors, rotors, and boxes — then custom- ise them with various manual or conveyor infeeds, special hoppers, different evacuation schemes, and a range of custom controls.” Customers are also considering options for
different motor drives, seeking additional improve- ments in power consumption and efficiency, and evaluating improvements in cutting hardware, cutting angles, and other aspects, Miller says. Looking to the future, he says: “I believe that among the areas for further progress are in the development and use of preventive maintenance programs and strategies, including software and systems that better track size-reduction equipment usage, efficiency, and wear, as well as how it integrates with other auxiliary equipment.”
Driving down defects Depending on the amount of material going through the granulator, it may not always make sense for it to be fed straight back into the injection moulding process. Maguire and its partner Plasmac recently supplied a recycling line to a
32 INJECTION WORLD | March 2020
large UK automotive parts supplier, which had been experiencing moulding defects due in part to incorporation of regranulated material. “They were caught in a vicious circle, they needed to reduce costs by reusing their scrap material, but by doing this, they were causing more moulding issues and therefore driving up their own scrap levels,” says Plasmac Sales Director Simon Jay. What was causing these issues? Firstly there was inconsistent feeding from the screw of the injection machine due to differing bulk densities of the virgin material and the granulated scrap material, leading to cavity defects; then there were issues caused by dust from the granulation process leading to imperfections in the finished goods; finally, there were contamination issues where metal clips would go through the granulator and end up in the finished product. “We ran trials on their material which they in turn tested themselves and they found by repelletising the scrap material they improved their output, their consistency and their quality and they reduced their scrap levels,” says Jay. “Payback was less than a year.”
Plasmac supplied an Alpha 70 recycling system with a water-cooled pelletiser and a flake feeder. The customer achieves an output of over 130 kg/h, repelletising all the scrap material from one department of its business. It has immediately seen improvements in productivity, improvements that Jay says are so impressive that the customer is already looking at investing in two more machines for two more moulding departments. The Alpha 70 is based on Plasmac’s short screw technology, which the company claims has the lowest levels of energy consumption in the industry, minimal heat history in the recycled material and “absolutely no material degradation.” Plasmac, previously based in Aylesbury, UK, but now headquartered in Busto Arsizio, Italy, is (since January 2019) 60% owned by recycling systems specialist Erema. The other 40% is owned by Syncro, which makes various components for blown film lines in Busto, and which is partly owned by Maguire.
CLICK ON THE LINKS FOR MORE INFORMATION: �
www.rapidgranulator.com �
www.cmg.it �
www.hellweg-granulators.com �
www.wittmann-group.com �
http://matsui.net �
www.conairgroup.com �
www.maguire.com �
www.plasmac.it
www.injectionworld.com
IMAGE: PLASMAC
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