TECHNOLOGY | HOT RUNNERS
Heatlock makes progress around the world
Heatlock, Swedish owned but located in Hong Kong and China, has 30 years’ experience in hot runner manufacturing. “We are a service company creating solutions for customers,” says the company’s owner Calle Helldin. “Our set-up is to ensure that we offer a fast and accurate service for high quality hot runner systems at an affordable price. We supply standardised products or hot runner solutions and hot-halves to meet specific requirements. Heatlock hot runners are known for their ceramic insulation, which insulate all the contact and location points from the mould. With our ceramic clamp technology – CE fix – we have made ceramics even easier to use with increased sustainability. Our workhorse series is built to last, affordable and versatile, with hot to cold, or direct gate solutions including valve gates. For quality and perfor- mance applications, we offer the floating manifold system with modular options to suit all kinds of moulding. The hot runners are engineered to make it simple and easy to use with maximum performance. Many options are available to suit all types of mouldings, including engineering filled resins. Hot runner systems are assembled and pre-wired with cable duct to fit into the mould.” Heatlock has an international distribution network, which includes i-mold in Germany and DMS Diemold in the UK, and continues to establish additional partnerships. For example, in 2019 Heatlock joined with two companies – Chinese mould maker TK Mold Shenzhen and Mexican mould equipment supplier
Privarsa – to expand in the growing Mexican injection moulding market. The companies say that the alliance is designed to fill a gap in the market and provide high quality moulds of 32 cavities and under, rather than 48 cavities and larger, which is often the focus of larger companies.
Left: Heatlock hot runners are known for their ceramic insulation, which insulate all the contact and location points from the mould
increasing performance requirements and the growing use of recyclate are complicating the issue. SIPA decided to devise an easier and more cost-effective solution to the problem. “What we wanted was something that was smart and simple at the same time,” says SIPA’s Global Engineering Manager Injection Molds & Hot Runners. “Simplicity is key to ensuring that the risk of malfunction is minimised.” The goal was to have a complete hot runner system that only needed maintenance to carry out standard renovation operations, such as replace worn components. A system that could run continu- ously for five million cycles before those moving parts subject to wear – piston seals and valves, for example – needed to be replaced. In a system running with a cycle time of 7s, that means it would be able to work continuously for 10,000 hours.
Air flows The SIPA XActive-Cleaning system adapts the compressed air flows, normally used to move the hot runner valves, to also blow out the few plastic particles that deposit inside the actuators each cycle. The hot runner system is equipped with a supplementary circuit incorporating a series of valves which, controlled with appropriate logic, govern the entry and discharge of air from the cylinders, making sure that any PET dust particles created in the system are evacuated every cycle. SIPA says that this solution should on its own be sufficient to keep the system clean. However, there is also a boost function that can be activated to perform a forced cleaning cycle, at intervals that can be set by the user (every 40,000 cycles, for example). This process lasts for a few tens of seconds, so it has no impact on productivity. A hot runner system incorporating XActive-
Cleaning includes additional channels within the plates themselves, so there are no obvious differ- ences from a conventional hot runner system, apart from an additional air connection with the XActive- Cleaning device. The cylinders for actuating valve movements have a special design, and there is also some special pipework feeding the box where the dust is collected. This box is located on the ground near the injection machine’s controls. The connec- tion between the XActive-Cleaning device and the machine is pneumatic. No changes are needed to the injection machine. The XActive-cleaning system is machine-independent and operates using pneumatic valves operated by the same circuit that manages the movement of the hot runner valve, so no modifications are necessary to the pneumatic system. The only extra task that the operator has to
52 INJECTION WORLD | November/December 2020
www.injectionworld.com
IMAGE: HEATLOCK
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