Hamilton, Ohio — Imflux officials use the term “disruptive” to describe their technology and make some claims to the benefits, starting with reducing molding pressure by up to 50 percent.
Imflux offers hardware and software.
“I would say our software and controls business is our biggest thing that we do. And our mold building business is designed to work synergistically with that,” said Gene Altonen, chief technology officer.
Here are some other claims:
• Lower cycle times. Altonen said it depends on the material, but normally Imflux can cut cycle time by about 20 percent.
• Tooling designs that deliver more than 50 percent throughput increases, on average, in the same size of smaller presses.
• Higher-quality parts by reducing molded-in stress and shrink variations inside the mold.
• The use of a wider range of processing windows and material melt flow indexes.
• Dramatically reduced cold runners by more than 50 percent.
• Significant energy reductions.
• Combining lower pressure settings and melt temperatures to enable over-molding.
• Part-weight reduction. One reason is Imflux doesn't over-pack the part. “So we're essentially putting, call it 1 to 2 percent less material, sometimes 3 percent less material into the mold,” Altonen said. But he said Imflux also lets a molder reduce part thickness — an argument for designing parts for the process up front.
A major benefit is lower, more efficient capital spending since Imflux allows for molding parts on smaller-tonnage presses. That equals fewer injection molding machines.
Jared Kline, vice president of customer operations, said Imflux works better as a platform — over several presses or an entire molding plant — rather than as a one-off.
“Sometimes we've seen that, if they look at it as an individual-machine basis, they don't give it the opportunity for the scale benefit to come out. And so, if you do 10 lines, if you do 20 lines, you might be able to eliminate some machines that you might not otherwise realize,” Kline said.
Altonen said customers have found other advantages, such as inventory reduction because of the faster cycle times.
