Orlando, Fla. — Moretto USA LLC of Jackson Center, Pa., is about to bring its first U.S. installation of its in-line Moisture Meter Manager online.
The manager, which is a resin moisture sensing and drying control, will begin operations at an undisclosed U.S. facility in July, said Gene Flockerzi, general manager for North America.
The control is an element among the growing number of Industry 4.0 advances involving auxiliary equipment for plastics processors.
In addition as part of a technology transfer from Europe, Flockerzi expects by the end of July to begin making final assemblies in the 30,000-square-foot Jackson Center facility.
"We are bringing the chassis over" from Italy now, he said in an interview at NPE2018 in Orlando.
Moretto USA moved its equipment and parts stocking operations to Jackson Center from Columbus, Ohio, in February.
Parent company Moretto SpA of Massanzago, Italy, developed the Moisture Meter Manager as part of its modular self-adjusting Eureka Plus resin-drying system, which enters the European market in July and then the U.S. market in the fourth quarter.
Relevant patents for the Eureka Plus cover the Moisture Meter Manager, the X Mas high-performance multibed dryer, the Flowmatik adaptive airflow management system and the OTX (Original Thermal eXchange) advanced hopper design.
Moretto licenses an integrated user-configurable supervision system, called Mowis, to support active feeding, drying, dosing, storage and cooling modules. A Mowis project can involve mold-recognition control, unique barcode control, automatic radio-frequency identification, material-lot and production-order handling, reverse-process and integrated-service management.
Industry 4.0 has the potential to offset the shortage of technical labor, the firm said. Use of the Moisture Meter Manager, for instance, can relieve humans of the responsibility for getting polymer materials dried.
The Moretto USA subsidiary employs 10.
"We need to hire four people now for internal functions and plan to have about 15 by the end of the year," Flockerzi said. Moretto USA has 20 independent sales representatives.
The Moretto product line includes dryers, feeders, dehumidifiers, volumetric and gravimetric blenders, temperature controllers, chillers and supervising systems.
