Beaumont unites research, education, industry under one roof

Erie, Pa. — Beaumont Technologies Inc. has moved into a 40,000-square-foot building that links the firm's education efforts through the American Injection Molding Institute, research, materials characterization, simulation expertise and real-world part design and molding.

Beaumont Technologies had two exhibits at NPE2018: a main one and another one highlighting Moldflow material characterization, test specimen molding, with full documentation of the molding conditions, and the firm's proprietary Therma-flo material characterization system and software.

John Beaumont, who founded the company and entered the Plastics Hall of Fame in 2015, said Beaumont Technologies is dedicated to integrating several disciplines.

"We're tying education directly with applied research. Education, research and industry under one roof. There's no model like that in the world," he said.

Beaumont Technologies, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, held an open house April 19 at its new headquarters. The facility in Erie, Pa., equipped with an underfloor tunnel carrying utilities to the injection presses, was built as an injection molding factory that housed custom molder Omni Plastics Inc., then EG Industries. EG moved out of the building last year and Beaumont Technologies moved in.

Beaumont moved from a 12,000-square-foot building. John Beaumont, a professor and former chairman of Penn State Erie's Plastics Engineering Technology program, founded the company in 1998 at an incubator space at the college.

The new facility has 13 injection molding machines; three in an AIM training area and 10 in the molding lab. Brands include KraussMaffei, Arburg, Sodick, Toyo, Nissei and Boy.

Beaumont Technologies today has three separate but interrelated businesses: the AIM, which provides education for engineers, technicians and management; Beaumont Development, which handles molding simulation and product design consulting; and Beaumont Advanced Processing, which does material characterization for Moldflow and others and helps customers develop new products, including by doing short-run molding.

Sharing research with the industry is a key feature, John Beaumont said. And it helps keep the educational efforts stay current. Complacency is not good, he said.

"What we're looking is to advance the industry, not just pushing one idea. We want to challenge everything that these guys [in industry] are doing and that we're doing also," he said in an interview at the open house in Erie. "Challenge it. Apply it in commercial applications. Learn from that. So, we close that loop. This is the umbrella of who we are. And then we share it with the outside world. And that's what we're doing. And then we share it through our teaching, our training."

AIM students get involved with some of the research, and they benefit.

"The AIM Institute does two things: both education and research," he said. "So, I modeled it very much like a university, where, if you're not doing research, you're just repeating what everybody else is doing. So, we built AIM so we continue to research and challenge things."

A good example of a real-world activity is Beaumont Technologies' close working relationship with material characterization for Moldflow, the injection molding simulation company owned by Autodesk Inc. Beaumont worked at Moldflow in its early years, and when he came to Penn State Erie in 1989, one of the first things he did was start the Plastics CAE Center.

Beaumont Technologies got into material characterization several years ago, developing its patented Therma-flo Moldometer, a special mold cartridge cut with channels that have flow geometries of various sizes. The process can show how a polymer will actually mold.

Last year, Beaumont acquired Moldflow's North American material characterization assets and technologies.

"We now supply all the material characterization for them [Moldflow] for North America and ​ Europe, and we're even doing some in Asia now," John Beaumont said.

A new technology for the company is called MFCheck — the Moldflow Check. Beaumont Technologies does actual molding of materials, collects the data and feeds it directly to Moldflow.

Physical molding helps Moldflow design more accurate simulation software by mapping how material behaves, Beaumont said.

"They're a software company. They're not a material characterization company," he said. "And they recognized this was a complex thing. What was taking them 12-15 weeks to do, we do in three or four weeks.

"Moldflow tries to predict everything we just ran. Because here we're measuring on the shop floor. And MFCheck now tells how much error there is in the programs under different fill speeds, geometries, all melt conditions. And so the [Moldflow] analyst now knows how much error there is with a given material," he said.

Moldflow could find out if the simulation is overpredicting or underpredicting one or more processing parameters of a given material.

For the material characterization work, Beaumont Technologies runs under about 300 different conditions — things like temperatures, flow rates, wall thicknesses.

Beaumont Technologies also does specialty product development for customers, including short run production, if necessary. The firm also does design consulting using Moldflow.

Industry can come to the Erie facility and do research. Beaumont said that Procter & Gamble Co.'s Imflux process came to his firm about four years ago.

"And we've been doing research with them. Until recently, we never acknowledged that because it was very secretive," he said.

Officials of Imflux have become more open to discussing the technology, which uses low and constant pressure to fill the mold — the opposite of the traditional high-pressure injection molding process.

Beaumont said Imflux is an example of challenging how things are done in plastics molding.

The commercial parts of his companies — Beaumont Advanced Processing and Beaumont Development — together with education at the American Injection Molding Institute, brings together key parts of the industry and can help the industry move forward, he said.

"We have the engineering design consultancy. We do actual production. So, what happens here is, in production, often times these people live in their own world, as a bubble. You have education often times in a bubble. And here, we've integrated [AIM] with a commercial entity. So, when commercial has challenges, we do the research. We feed the research back into commercial and out to the broader industry," Beaumont said.