The largest part on display on the booth of Aichach, Germany-based mold maker Deckerform Technologies GmbH during Fakuma 2024 was a Pentatonic battery housing produced by Bonn, Germany-based Kautex Textron GmbH & Co. KG.
The huge, award-winning 1,600- x 1,200- x 200-millimeter housing was developed with assistance of Aachen, Germany-based IKV institute for plastics processing and has been claimed by Kautex to be the "first ever full-scale fully thermoplastic battery enclosure."
It is molded in an one-shot process on one of Kautex's serial production compression molding lines. Deckerform supplied the mold tool, which weighs 30 metric tons, a large size for the company, which produces mold tools in weights ranging from 500 kilograms to 35 tonnes.
The part is a combination of nylon-based long-fiber-reinforced thermoplastic with integrated side organic sheet and molded-on ribs and walls in glass-fiber-reinforced nylon 6.
At Fakuma, Deckerform showed its new foamed injection molding processes, including PolyFoamX, which involves physically or chemically activated thin-wall foam in recycled plastic applied by back molding on one side of a compact molding.
Managing Director Anna Tschacha says the process is "open source," unhindered by intellectual property and associated licensing costs that have acted as a brake on such development in the past.
The process takes place in a single mold, with simple movement of spacers to accommodate the foamed plastic component. Deckerform plastics engineer Peter Ottilinger describes PolyFoam X as "a useful addition to in-mold labeling that does not need either a second mold or expensive ancillary equipment with associated costs and use of resources."
Deckerform sees PolyFoamX potential in enhancing stiffness of recycled plastic moldings, compensating for lower flexural modulus than in original virgin plastic, due to additional thermal and mechanical stress during recycling.
As stiffness is a function of part thickness, it can be largely restored to by a back-foamed layer, without a weight penalty or surface quality impairment in terms of silver streaking foam swirl effects.
Another foam process presented by Deckerform results from development work over the past year in back-foaming organic sheet, combining high tensile and flexural strength of organic sheet with "efficient and rigid lightweight construction" with the foam.