The TOP 5000 P mixing and dosing equipment introduced by Oftering, Austria-based Elmet Elastomere Produktions- und Dienstleistungs GmbH at the Fakuma fair featured a new touch control panel and a system of labeling each of the two LSR component drums with letters A and B, to help prevent production disruption due to incorrect drum connection.
But the system offers more, as it can handle a large range in amounts of colors and additives with high precision, as LSR World recently learned. It talks of typically 10 percent addition, with 20 percent sometimes used, while customers are known who apply as little as 0.02 percent additive to LSR.
Dosing precision is ensured with externally produced volume meters exactly determining the amount of LSR base material, LSR flow being recorded with 64,000 increments per liter. This is also the rate for recording low amounts of additive flow at fine resolution — just several grams shot weight is typically required for 2 percent color content. Most additives known by Elmet to be applied with its equipment are for coloring, but oils, medicinal agents, or conductive additives are sometimes also involved.
Elmet has addressed agglomeration and contamination risks when mixing additives into external drums, now providing for critical applications a container for additives and colors fitted with a permanently moving agitator and a fine filter and clamped onto the equipment — a claimed better solution than conventional turning or shaking. The agitation system is available on a 20-liter container.
Additives and colors previously needed mixing directly in a conventional drum and this has been known to lead not only to separation and agglomeration of drum constituents over time, but also to risk of contamination during external mixing.