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October 13, 2015 02:00 AM

Wittmann is bullish after strong year

David Eldridge
Plastics News Europe
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    Caroline Seidel
    Michael Wittmann, CEO of Wittmann Group, said the company is on track for solid sales growth in 2015.

    Friedrichshafen, Germany — This year is turning out very nicely for Wittmann Group, says Michael Wittmann, CEO of the Austria-based manufacturer of injection molding machines, robots and ancilliary equipment.

    “2015 has been a good year for us — quite surprisingly, because I expected it to be a year of correction,” he said during the group's news conference at Fakuma 2015, Oct. 13 in Friedrichshafen.

    Although there has been a correction in stock markets, it has not greatly affected industrial markets.

    Wittmann said the group's sales in 2015 will be 340 million ($387 million) to 350 million euros ($398.4 million), calling this “a firm figure.” This would be an increase of 11 to 14 percent on 2014 group sales of 306 million euros (about $340 million).

    Order income in 2015 has been strong, showing an increase of about 15 percent vs. the previous year. There has been strong demand for Wittmann Battenfeld's MacroPower and new SmartPower injection molding machines, and also in other product areas such as robots and temperature controllers.

    It has been a year of expansion at Wittmann plants in Europe, Asia and North America. An expansion at the Kottingbrunn facility on Austria has added a machining center for MacroPower platens, and a new technical center will also open in spring 2016.

    In Vienna, its robot plant is being expanded to increase production capacity from 4,200 robots to 4,500 robots per year. Its second Vienna plant is being reconstructed and adapted to the requirements for production of water flow controllers and mold temperature controllers.

    On Oct. 19, the group will open a new materials handling facility at a location 19 kilometers northwest of Wittmann's Vienna plants.

    In Hungary, the group opened a new sales and service subsidiary in September. In July, the group opened a new building in Taichung, Taiwan. In the United States, it has acquired a neighboring plant next to its facility in Connecticut, which will house the peripheral equipment department starting in February.

    “Our U.S. guys are very proud to say this site is now a campus,” said Michael Wittmann.

    He was asked during the Q&A session when Wittmann will build machines in China. “Not yet,” he replied. “But if you don't manufacture in China, you're not in China. ... Hungary is a test for China. ... It will come. It has to come.”

    Looking to 2016, Michael Wittmann said he is hoping for another good year, but it is difficult to foresee events. He indicated the possible fall-out in the automotive sector from Volkswagen AG's fines in the emissions testing scandal, saying the Wittmann group gets strong demand from automotive customers.

    “Definitely as a partner [of automotive suppliers] we would feel it, but hopefully not too strongly,” he said.

    The Wittmann 4.0 concept is the group's take on Industry 4.0. “Our approach is very clear,” he said, as it makes the molding machine the control center for all other machines and processes.

    The machine is transformed into a control terminal for robots and peripherals as well as superordinate systems such as the “authentig” manufacturing software from TIG, based in Austria. Following the motto “plug and produce,” Wittmann 4.0 allows dynamic plug-in and plug-out of auxilliary equipment, such as the group's Flowcon flow controllers and Gravimax gravimetric blenders, even while the machine is running.

    Michael Wittmann said it would not be developed to integrate other companies' equipment: “Wittmann 4.0 is us. I don't see an advantage to incorporate others.”

    Wittmann Battenfeld is extending its technology for the medical market. It decided to roll out a medical version of the all-electric EcoPower first, and then qualify it in a clean room. For this purpose, an ISO standard class 6 clean room from Germany's Max Petek Reinraumtechnik was installed at the Wittmann Battenfeld plant in Kottingbrunn, Austria. GMP (good manufacturing practice) standard machine documentation has been made available for machines of the medical version. The installation of the clean room now gives the company's customers an opportunity to carry out production tests for tooling acceptance at the Kottingbrunn facility under real conditions 

    Fakuma features

    Caroline Seidel

    Wittmann Battenfeld is molding micro catheter parts at its Fakuma booth.

    At Fakuma, Wittmann Battenfeld is showing a clean room version of its EcoPower range, an EcoPower 110/350 producing a contact lens tray made of polypropylene.

    The machine is equipped with a good part/reject separator and an encapsulated clean room conveyor belt from Max Petek Reinraumtechnik mounted below the clamping unit. The parts fall freely onto the encapsulated clean room conveyor belt and are subsequently transported to a laminar flow workstation.

    A second medical demonstration is a MicroPower 15/10 making a PEEK micro catheter with a weight of about 20 mg, produced with a single-cavity mold supplied by Ernst Wittner GmbH, Austria. The machine on display comes as a full-fledged clean-room production cell, equipped with a rotary disk, parts removal handling device, integrated quality inspection by image processing, as well as a clean-room module, which produces class 6 clean air according to the ISO 14644-1 standard. The parts are all injected, quality-inspected and deposited inside the clean room.

    At Fakuma 2015, Witmann Battenfeld is launching SmartPower 350 – the largest model of the SmartPower servo hydraulic machine series. The SmartPower machine series was presented for the first time at Fakuma 2014 with clamping forces of up to 120 tonnes. The series has now been completed with the larger sizes from 160 to 350 tonnes.

    The SmartPower is equipped as standard with an energy-efficient, servo hydraulic drive, which stands out by its high dynamism and low noise level, the company said. The drive technology of the SmartPower makes it possible to use the Kinetic Energy Recovery System (KERS) developed for the EcoPower. KERS transforms the kinetic energy released by deceleration into electrical energy. The electrical energy recovered in this way is partly stored, used by other drive systems for parallel movements, transferred to barrel heating or used to generate the voltage for the control system. This means that the entire deceleration energy is used within the machine.

    At Fakuma 2015, a natural fiber organic sheet component is being produced with a single-cavity mold from Georg Kaufmann, based in Switzerland, on a SmartPower 350/2250. The mold is equipped with a hot runner with needle shut-off, an edge folding slider for in-mold forming of the organic sheet and a punching die to punch out an aperture in it.

    The automation system developed by Wittmann Robot Systeme in Nuremberg is custom-made for this application and comes with a station to feed the organic sheets cut to size, a heating station to heat the organic sheets with heating elements supplied by Krelus, based in Switzerland, and a multi-functional gripper with a needle gripper to pick up the heated organic sheet, and a suction unit for finished parts removal.

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