Livonia, Mich. — Matsui America Inc. of Hanover Park, Ill., is partnering with the new SA Engineering Technology Collaboration Center in Livonia.
The center's main objective is to provide the automotive industry with the latest plastics processing technology and to serve as an incubator for developing production technologies.
Matsui's factor 4 Technology Division developed a process that uses hot and cold molding technologies to create surface characteristics of injection molded parts not commonly found in conventional molding.
“We believe that we will be enabling designers of interior and exterior automotive parts in creating unique surface effects, molded in colors, Class A surfaces out of the mold and other innovative surface finishes, with our installed rapid heat/rapid cool molding equipment,” said Nobu Yamanaka, technology director at Matsui America, in a news release
“For Matsui, it will give us the opportunity to demonstrate the benefits of RHRC molding; a technology that has been long applied in electronic consumer goods, but not necessarily in automotive,” Yamanaka said.
Matsui will have two RHRC systems at the center. One will be based on water as the heating medium. This will enable trials as existing molds using existing cooling channels. The second is based on an induction heating coil as the mold cavity heating medium.
Matsui is a unit of Matsui Manufacturing Co. Ltd., an auxiliary and technology equipment company based in Osaka, Japan.
