Martin Hoyer, head of application technology development at Arburg GmbH + Co. KG, will make a presentation March 25 at the PIAE Europe c2020 conference in Mannheim, Germany, organized by VDI (the Association of German Engineers.
Hoyer will speak at the conference, focused on automotive plastics, about in-process material preparation and resource conservation in lightweight construction. In automotive engineering, fiber reinforcement of plastics gives targeted modification of properties for lightweight construction. He will discuss the fibre-direct compounding process (FDC), jointly developed by Arburg and the Kunststoffzentrum SKZ in Würzburg, Germany
The FDC process has 40 percent lower costs than special long-fiber granulates, according to Arburg.
FDC uses a side feeder fitted onto the injection molding machine, with an integrated cutting devicre, an adapted cylinder and a special screw geometry. The glass fibers are supplied as rovings and cut inline, then fed directly into the liquid melt.
Arburg, of Lossburg, Germany, is involved in other research projects that will be presented at PIAE. One example is the MoPaHyb project (modular production system for the manufacture of highly resilient hybrid components), illustrating the economical production of hybrid fiber component components. For that project, Arburg and the Fraunhofer ICT in Pfinztal, Germany, have developed a bolt-on long-fiver injection unit with direct fiber compounding and used it on a vertical 3,600-metric ton Diffenbacher press.
Arburg also collaborated on two research projects with the Technical University of Dresden, for Germany’s’ FOREL research platform for the development of lightweight systems for electric vehicles.
One is the SamPA project that focuses on the integral manufacturing of hybrid sandwich structures using particle foam composite injection molding. The second is an modular system for fiber composites of the FuPro project, in which thermoplastic sheets, fiber composite hollow profiles and injection molding compound are combined to form highly integrative multi-component structures. That technology, along with an automated process chain developed for the project, won the AVK Innovation Prize and the Materialica Award in Gold in 2019.
Also at the PIAE Europe conference, Arburg will present functional components that were produced in its Freeformer additive manufacturing machine.