Lee's Summit, Mo. — R&D/Leverage has filed for 15 patents in 2017 related to tooling for injection blow molding. The result is what the company calls its Liberty IBM system.
“We've had great success with our expertise in the injection stretch blow process — we took a more scientific approach to designing a preform for that process," said Bruce Wardlow, director of product development.
“So we took our scientific approach in injection stretch blow and converted it to innovating tooling for the injection blow process to resolve the inherent issues in the IBM tooling, perform root cause analysis, and develop new technologies to solve these problems,” Wardlow said.
The system is designed to solve problems that are inherent to the injection blow molding process, especially for the start-up of the run, according to Jeff Chen, director of research & simulation at the Lee's Summit based company.
The system deals with problems including:
• Thermal expansion-related problems like bowing of the die-set.
• Ability to do “cold starts” without having to torch the nozzles.
• Minimizes thermal expansion-induced wear at the nozzle tip and gate area, which also eliminates frequent replacement of the nozzle.
• The need to engage and disengaging the manifold from the injection cavity for startup and shutdown.
• Parting line mismatch.
R&D/Leverage currently has 16 Liberty IBM systems running in the field with cavitation as high as 38 cavities.
In September, the company will host an open house. The theme this year is Breaking Down the Silos in Plastic Packaging, featuring keynote speaker, Gerry O'Brion, a marketing expert and author. Go to www.rdleverage.com/open-house.html for information.