SCHWAIG, GERMANY (Sept. 11, 8 a.m. ET) — Injection molding of medical vials was a feature at an open day for Sumitomo (SHI) Demag’s customers which took place at its Schwaig headquarters in Germany in May, attracting more than 400 visitors.
The German-Japanese company demonstrated the application on an all-electric IntElect 50 machine in a four cavity mold from Zahoransky Formenbau of Germany. Four transparent vials were created per shot, each made of a cyclic olefin copolymer (COC) from Topas with a part weight of around 1.2 g in a cycle time of 11 s.
The molding was done in a production cell with integrated six-axis robot. A laminar flow module from Max Petek of provided the quality of air required for category 7 clean rooms.
Sumitomo (SHI) Demag said the need for process consistency, precision and parts quality was met by its technology modules called activeLock, activeDynamics and activeFlowBalance.
ActiveLock is a switchable non-return valve technology which minimizes shot weight fluctuations to enhance quality and precision. Quality also benefits from the activeFlowBalance function, which balances multi-cavity mold filling behavior.
The activeDynamics function has been installed as standard on all IntElect machines since April this year. It is designed to ensure perfectly synchronized motors, frequency converters and machine controls, and so achieves short scanning times of the axle controllers.
The company says it has moved the scanning, which is usually carried out by the machine control, directly into the converter, which forms a unity with the motor.
It said: “This has meant a precisely synchronized unified high-speed communication system has been created which ensures extremely quick and absolutely reproducible reactions by the injection molding machine.”
Sumitomo (SHI) Demag product manager Peter Gladigau said: “The maximum injection speed which can be achieved is frequently referred to as a criterion with regards to electric machines. Yet precisely in the cases of thin-walled precision, smallest or micro-parts with their short injection times, much more crucially important factors apply, such as how steep the acceleration ramp is, that is how quickly the screw can be accelerated so as even to be able to fill certain parts completely.
