Application and Function of Plastic Auxiliary Machine in Injection Molding Process

 

Definition of Plastic Auxiliary Machine

Plastic auxiliary machinery plays a very important role in plastic processing of blown film and filature, extrusion, injection molding and slush molding, as well as plastic processing machinery, and they are all applied to finish each manufacturing procedure. Therefore, the product quality and commercial viability of enterprises depend on the enhanced plastic auxiliary equipment to some extent, other than their automation and rationalization. Plastic auxiliary equipment is classified in Following series in terms of function, such as Drying and Dehumidifying, Feeding and Conveying, Dosing and Mixing, Heating and Cooling, Granulating and Recycling and Molding Extractors. They are used to deal with materials or products before / after molding process.

 

 

Function of Plastic Auxiliary machinery in Injection Molding Process

Drying and Dehumidifying Equipments

There are a large number of hygroscopic plastic materials, such as ABS, POM, PC, PA, PMMA and so on. Before molding, we have to remove moisture from these materials with drying and dehumidifying equipments. And those polyolefin used for process must be dried completely, ensuring high quality products. For example, when producing PP-R tube, pipe molding, and cross-linking polyethylene, the material of polyethylene need to be dried, reaching acceptable moisture level.

 

Different methods and different equipments will be used to dry materials according to different moisture levels of customers need. We often use hopper dryers (SHD-U) to dry common plastics (PP / PE), while using desiccant dryers to dry hygroscopic engineering plastics (PET / PA) with hopper dryers, which can provide dry air with low dew-point and ensure materials with acceptable moisture level.

 

Feeding and Conveying Equipments

Material feeding and conveying equipments can be used to convey material to material storage hoppers, dryers, or to molding machinery directly. According to actual transportation requirements and methods, there are two kinds of transportation methods, named mechanical transportation and fluid transportation. Mechanical transportation can be divided into belt conveying and spiral conveying. At the same time, fluid transportation can be divided into vacuum loading and pressure feeding.

 

Dosing and Mixing Equipments

Mixing and dosing procedure of masterbatch, additive, and recycling material is a very important part in plastic process. And in order to fight against fierce market competition and increase of material cost, the leaders of companies make every effort to improve product quality, reduce cost and material consumption. Therefore, Dosing and Mixing equipments are becoming necessity during production. With a better Dosing and Mixing equipment, yield rate of products will be increased largely, in a while, we can avoid unnecessary loss. But the traditional manual gauging method is adopted by most of domestic companies, sometimes with simple auto blending. Nowadays, with improvement of strict craftsmanship of product quality, the number of mixing and dosing equipments is demanding.

 

Heating and Cooling Equipments

Heating equipments are used to control the moulds temperature of process machinery in extrusion, injection molding process. The operation principle is based on heating up oil or water.

 

Moulds chiller is also used to cool down the temperature of injection mould. And there are many cooling water channels in the mould, where the cooling water passes through. The following description is about two types of chiller. One is named Air-cooled Chiller, and the other is named Water-cooled Chiller. The Air-cooled Chiller has the advantage of light weight while Water-cooled Chiller posses high efficiency of heat exchange.

 

Granulating and Recycling Equipments

Plastic products bring convenience to peoples life as well as horrible white pollution. Proportion of small pieces of waste in plastic processing reaches about 5%~20% out of total production. In other words, reclamation and utilization of waste pieces determine the companys survival. So the decision maker of company pays more attention on this problem.

 

Robot

With the fast development of domestic plastic processing, automation level of injection molding machinery is becoming more and more advanced. And modern injection machine is often equipped with robotics to improve production efficiency. Robotics, based on the simulation of partial function of humans upper limb, can be applied to convey products according to customers requirements or operate automatically with tool. The application of robotics play a very important role in production department, because it can greatly reduce labor demand, improve working condition, ensure work security, cut down defective products, result in low cost, and increase the competitiveness company.

 

Development of Plastic Auxiliary Equipment

Popular Energy-efficient Equipments

The price of energy is increasing all the time, and it becomes the focus at the time. Therefore, companies providing energy-efficient equipment as well as buyers take this phenomenon into account as a very important factor of purchase thinking. Energy consumption of plastic auxiliary equipments is a very important composition of production line in plastic processing. In order to ensure highly stable performance and reliability, longer heating and drying time is indispensable, energy saving is becoming one of the most important trend and technology for new product development.

 

Introduction of New Technologies to Plastic Processing

Introducing new process technology is another measure to realize energy-efficient, other than bringing energy-efficient measure into existing systems. For example, infrared technology becomes more popular in plastic processing industry.

 

Infrared heat resource is an efficiency alternative to conventional drying and dehumidifying method. With this technology being applied in drying process, drying time can be shortened from previous hour rank to minute rank, and energy consumption will also be reduced greatly.

 

Comprehensive System Solutions Supplier

In many case, the dividing line between mainframe manufactures and auxiliary manufactures are increasingly blurred. The company producing auxiliary equipments begins to purchase those companies providing plastic processing equipment, because they are not satisfied with developing relative technologies, and expanding new product lines. Since they can provide system solutions for customers from auxiliary equipments to processing machineries. The manufactures who continue to focus on auxiliary service improve their own production lines constantly to work towards system suppliers.

 

PET Recycling Technology to Achieve High-value re-use of Materials

With fast development of plastic hollow packaging markets, business men all over the world are all focusing on the recycling technologies of PET bottles. Because the properties of PET material from recycling bottles are very bad, and the recycling material is also difficult for bottle reproduction. And it is used in low end application only, such as production of short fiber. So business men pay more attention on the PET recycle technology which can be applied in the production from recycled PET bottles to new bottles. Furthermore, PET package brings revolutionary changes to packaging industry of soft drink. And in order to realize reclamation of PET with high efficiency, this new technology of PET becomes the focus of many companies which hope to be such a company that can produce equipment of this kind.