This month, Best Practices gets even cooler.
We take you to Portland, Ore., where a packaging think tank called D6 Inc. has created a 22,000-square-foot headquarters and thermoforming processing facility.
D6's new headquarters has a process cooling system from Frigel North America, a unit of Florence, Italy-based Frigel Firenze SpA.
D6 develops packaging for both food and non-food applications. Frigel built an intelligent process cooling system designed specifically to support D6's ability to rapidly produce prototype molds and parts.
And D6 is fast.
"We pride ourselves on being the fastest production-grade prototyping company in the world for our clients, creating progressive concepts in a matter of hours, compared to the monthly time frames of our competitors," D6 President Edward Dominion said. "Our unique capabilities, combined with our new facility, allow us to produce anywhere from 10 to 500,000-plus parts per month, per line, so that our clients are able to prove a concept at the store level within two to four weeks of the initial design phase."
Frigel makes closed-loop fluid cooling systems that use adiabatic technology that circulates process water through wetted panels, and passes air over the panels to remove the heat. The company said the cooling technology consumes less water than traditional cooling towers, cuts energy use, eliminates chemical discharges and needs less maintenance.
