Oak Brook, Ill. — IMTECH attendees got a dose of hard metal at the inaugural IMTECH conference: precision side valve gating, conformal cooling and tooling for liquid silicone rubber.
Donald Hickel, regional sales manager of Männer USA Inc., said valve gating is a high-precision technology, and that added advantages come from side gating.
"The big benefit here is compact mold design," he said.
Männer USA is a unit of Germany-based Otto Männer GmbH, owned by the publicly traded Barnes Group Inc.
Hickel said Männer got into valve gate nozzles to meet customer demand for better high-cavitation molds. The company offers the Edgeline hot runner valve gate nozzle for side injection.
Medical parts like syringes and other applications that can have no outside gate vestige are the most common uses of side valve gating.
Hickel said Edgeline, now in its third generation, "has been used extensively in Europe. And one of my goals is to bring it the United States."
"The whole focus of the Edgeline is to be able to produce higher part density, higher cavitation in certain applications," he said.
Otto Männer makes hot runners, molds and micromolding systems.
The tool design session was Aug. 2 at IMTECH in Oak Brook.