KraussMaffei: ‘Where injection molding stops, additive manufacturing starts'

With K 2022 closing in on its final days, it's safe to say that, despite the twin challenges of COVID and travel disruptions, the turnout at the show is impressive. And, as always, the KraussMaffei stand is thronged with staff and visitors crowded around the various exhibits.

According to Stefan Fenske, director global application owner IMM, that's not surprising.

"People are keen to meet in person again. It is great to be able to be face to face with people again," he said, during a brief interview with Sustainable Plastics.

His colleague Carl Pöpel, director of global product management, agreed: "People want to get back to normal — which is great. Because we have a lot to show them."

Q: What is, for you, different about this K, compared with previous shows?

Fenske: The strong focus on circular economy, sustainability and climate protection — it is the first time these have been actual K fair themes.

For us, K has always been the show to introduce innovations and new developments and this show is no different, with our introduction of additive manufacturing as a completely new technology. Of course, next to the new product lines, we are focusing on the pain points of our customers, and one of these is energy efficiency and sustainable processing to save as much CO2 as possible.

One example of this is our precisionMolding demonstration, where we are processing a bio-based PE. One tonne of that material binds three tonnes of CO2, so we are even showing solutions with overall CO2 reduction impact.

Pöpel: Also, as we said in the beginning, people are just so very glad to be back, because they — customers and colleagues — missed the 'family' feeling we have here at KraussMaffei. That makes this K special, as well as the fact that it is the 70th anniversary of the fair.

Fenske: As far as difference in attendance is concerned: It is a little less, but very much better than expected, given the fact that COVID made it almost impossible for the Chinese to travel, who tended to be a noticeable percent of our visitors.

Q: Your big news announcement here was your entering the additive manufacturing arena. Why did KraussMaffei decide to step into AM? Why now?

Fenske: We chose to enter this area now because it is time to open up additive manufacturing technology for industrial, serial production. This is our aim. There are a great many solutions on the market for prototyping or to quickly print a mold for testing purposes, for trials. But now it is really moving towards industrialization and mass production.

Pöpel: It is targeted at lot sizes of only one, where it makes no sense to make an injection molding tool. The powerPrint has a build volume of 10 cubic meters and can print items as large as the cast platens we use for our machines in a relatively short time. Big products, highly customized products, or even a big fitting or a one-off design product. It's a niche, as only one or two competitors have this size.

Q: Was the development of the new printers in response to customer demand?

Fenske: Yes, definitely. For us, this is about taking our capacity for productivity, quality and efficiency in industrial plastics processing and applying it to additive manufacturing solutions. Customers are facing increased and rapidly changing demands — faster time to market, lightweight design, individualization — and additive manufacturing can address these demands, filling the void. As one of our colleagues says: Where injection molding comes to an end, additive manufacturing starts.

Pöpel: Right now, we have the three pillars of injection molding, extrusion and resin process machinery, all three of which are supported by our Digital & Service Solutions area, and now additive manufacturing is the fourth one. Adding this to our technology portfolio also means we can advise our customers on the best technology that matches their application.

Q: How long did KraussMaffei work on the development of its new additive manufacturing solutions?

Fenske: Three years. But we always had the K 2022 deadline in sight! Without it, we might not yet have come so far.

Q: How are economic factors such as the cost of energy impacting customers' purchasing decisions?

Fenske: The substitution of older machines with new, way more energy-efficient machines is definitely a trend that we see in the market. In fact, energy-efficiency is a huge topic. However, the rising interest rates and the geopolitical situation in Europe — the huge cocktail of problems we have at the moment — are all very challenging for our customers and this is causing some postponed investments in new machines. We are responding with a strong focus on energy-efficient and overall sustainable solutions. Three years ago, carbon emission reductions were all anyone was talking about. And now, its all about energy efficiency because of the soaring cost of energy, even though basically, it comes to the same thing.

At the same time, we now have a very cost-attractive machine in the electric field: the precisionMolding, our new baby. Customers can now choose between the sophisticated and energy-efficient PX that does everything, and the standard model, with fewer options that requires considerably less investment — and is also energy-efficient.

Pöpel: When it comes to extrusion, our 28 BluePower is the most energy-efficient, premium compounder in the world; it's why we called it BluePower when it was introduced six years ago. But has the highest gearbox efficiency and so on.

Q: How are these factors affecting your operations internally? How have you responded?

Fenske: We have obviously, just like all our competitors, had to raise our prices.

Pöpel: Ninety percent of all energy consumption prices are generated during the operation phase. Mainly, it's a topic our customers must deal with. But the remaining 10 percent is directly related to our product — so, generated during the production of the machine, as this process also costs energy and causes emissions. We are aiming to reduce this, so that by 2030, KraussMaffei will be climate neutral, as far as its production is concerned.

We have been very lucky in that the past few years have seen enormous investments being made in new plants, with solar panels. The two new plants in Germany — in Laatzen for extrusion technologies and Parsdorf for injection molding and reaction process technologies — are the biggest photovoltaic installations in Germany. We have geothermal heating, an intelligent venting system and intelligent LED system. We could never have done this kind of energy optimization with our old buildings, but now, starting from scratch, we can. And we now have state-of-the-art production sites that have been certified according to all the latest German energy regulations and norms.

Fenske: It's a huge investment and for us, marks the biggest difference between our new Chinese owners, who have long-term vision and are investing for the future, and the four previous private equity owners, who took a totally different approach.

Q: In what way does KraussMaffei differentiate itself from its competitors in this respect?

Pöpel: Well, we've always promoted ourselves as being the TOC — total cost of ownership — champions. What does that mean? Only about 20 percent of the cost of a machine is the capex, the amount spent to purchase the machine; 80 percent of the cost is in the opex phase, and that is our focus. Even though our machines may cost a bit more to purchase than those of our competitors, we try to bring the costs down for the customer in that 80 percent by reducing the rejection rate, the cycle times and such, and providing energy efficiency. That's where we can make a difference. Second, we enable our customers to recycle; and third, we make it possible for them to use an increasingly high amount of recyclate, so to produce products with a higher level of recycled content with no compromise on quality.

Fenske: We are demonstrating this here at K 2022 with the GX 1100-4300 DCIM exhibit, showing that we can feed different post-industrial waste plastics with different viscosities into a single-screw extruder and make it processable for an injection molding machine, which is turning it into collapsible crates.

And in the future, we want to go further and use post-consumer waste. That is what we are working for now. We are not there yet, but that's the goal. One of the problems to overcome is, for example, odor.

Q: What kind of progress have you seen regarding the circular economy since 2019?

Pöpel: Our circular economy exhibit really runs in a fully closed cycle. We were not doing that at the previous K. It features a PX 200-1400 molding caps for insulin pens under clean room conditions, in short cycle times and with minimum use of resources. In fact, the PP used to mold the caps is a mass-balanced 30 percent post-consumer recycled-content PP from ExxonMobil.

After being shredded, the manufactured insulin pen caps serve as the basis for an upcycling process with a ZE 28 BluePower twin-screw extruder, which blends, homogenizes and recompounds these, together with some additives and fillers, into new material that is molded on a powerMolding 1300-11900 with a clamping force of 13,000 kilonewtons, into an automotive front-end carrier made of 100 percent recycled material.

More in general, we will continue our research and development work in mechanical, chemical and solvent recycling. We are already in projects with customers on these, we have already delivered machines and we see a lot of further potential in all three methods.

We work with big material producers on chemical recycling. We've also delivered several lines for glycolytic degradation of PET, which may sound like a solvent process but is actually chemical recycling, because the polymer chains are actually broken down. We have installed machinery for these lines for Indorama in Mexico and DAK in the U.S., and these are already up and running. The lines use PureCycle Technology, originally developed by Procter & Gamble — we are the main partners for all PCT installations.

We have been doing mechanical recycling for many decades, using our Edelweiss process, which is basically recycling and compounding in one step. The really major topics in this area are odor removal, food-contact approved applications and high throughputs of, say, 12-15 tonnes per hour.

Q: What do you see as the role of machine builders in promoting more sustainability for your customers?

Fenske: Again, having the total cost of ownership for our customers at the center of our thinking, to tell them yes, our machines are more expensive — but they are worth it. Our role is to provide sustainable solutions for our customers that are as energy-efficient as possible and save as much CO2 as possible. We offer energy efficiency, but we also have the application know-how in our company to provide advice and consultancy to our customers, on the one hand to support them in finding the right partners for recycled material, but on the other, to optimize their injection molding process to enable them to shave off another 1 or 2 percent of their energy consumption, because, I repeat: The money is spent in the operation phase of the machine.

And it's not just on the product side, but also on the digital aspect: We have our socialProduction product family, which is basically human machine communication made easy, providing condition-based monitoring and predictive maintenance. This is something we are putting a lot of focus on in the moment. Digital products help the machine operators know when there is a problem. Think of machine going into the night shift that warns the plant manager of a problem via their smartphone, enabling him or her to respond on time, saving a night of scrap production.

And these socialProduction products are something our competitors just don't have.