Significantly shorter cycle times

Mr. Saß, which ENGEL in­jec­tion mould­ing ma­chines al­ready have this ad­di­tion­al op­tion?

Saß: Re­gard­less of the ma­chine se­ries and the dri­ve tech­nol­o­gy used, we are now of­fer­ing the Z‑System for all in­jec­tion mould­ing ma­chines in our port­fo­lio that work with a CC300 con­trol unit. The CC300 is our cur­rent con­trol gen­er­a­tion. It is char­ac­ter­ized by in­tu­itive op­er­a­tion and clear menu nav­i­ga­tion and en­ables smart, high­ly ef­fi­cient nav­i­ga­tion through com­plex man­u­fac­tur­ing processes.

And how can we specif­i­cal­ly imag­ine the in­ter­ac­tion of the Z‑System with the con­trol sys­tem of the SGM?

Saß: Just as the user is fa­mil­iar with from the use of ad­di­tion­al pres­sure or tem­per­a­ture sen­sors, the Z‑System mold is in­te­grat­ed in­to the func­tion­al scope of our in­jec­tion mold­ing ma­chine. When the mold is set up, the process-spe­cif­ic set­ting da­ta record is au­to­mat­i­cal­ly adopt­ed, in which all rel­e­vant tem­per­a­ture and time pa­ra­me­ters are stored. On a sep­a­rate Z‑system page on the CC300’s touch­screen con­trol pan­el, the user can then see all the re­quired pa­ra­me­ters and make his se­lec­tion. This means that he does not have to use ad­di­tion­al ex­ter­nal de­vices or go to the back of the ma­chine to make ad­just­ments to the Z‑system. All se­lect­ed val­ues are al­so stored in the pro­duc­tion da­ta record. This means that they are im­me­di­ate­ly avail­able for re­trieval as soon as the tool is placed on the ma­chine again.

Why did you as a ma­chine man­u­fac­tur­er de­cide to in­te­grate the Z‑System from hotset?

Saß: Our two com­pa­nies have al­ready had a very live­ly co­op­er­a­tion for many years. And since we pur­sue the same goal with the top­ic “avoid­ance of weld lines”, it was an im­por­tant con­cern for us to co­op­er­ate al­so in this area. In ad­di­tion, as a ma­chine man­u­fac­tur­er, we al­ways fo­cus on two — some­times op­pos­ing — lines of de­vel­op­ment: on the one hand, we en­able our cus­tomers to meet the con­tin­u­ous­ly in­creas­ing qual­i­ty re­quire­ments for vis­i­ble plas­tic com­po­nents; on the oth­er hand, we have to of­fer the users of our SGM op­tions with which they can de­sign their pro­cess­ing op­er­a­tions even more ef­fi­cient­ly and eco­nom­i­cal­ly. From our point of view, this bal­anc­ing act suc­ceeds par­tic­u­lar­ly well with the Z‑System.

Schwarzkopf: Above all, be­cause this high-speed so­lu­tion with its tar­get­ed par­tial dy­nam­ic tem­per­a­ture con­trol al­so makes a cen­tral con­tri­bu­tion to op­ti­miz­ing the en­tire in­jec­tion mold­ing process be­yond im­prov­ing part qual­i­ty. This is be­cause its ex­treme heat­ing speed of 60 K/s and very short cool­ing rates of around 30 K/s al­low high­ly dy­nam­ic mold tem­per­a­ture con­trol to be im­ple­ment­ed with­out ex­tend­ing the cy­cle time. Since these enor­mous­ly fast tem­per­a­ture changes are al­so achieved with an av­er­age en­er­gy con­sump­tion of on­ly about 100 W/h, the Z‑system is an ex­treme­ly en­er­gy-ef­fi­cient solution.

Can you con­firm this from the point of view of the ma­chine builder, Mr. Saß?

Saß: Yes, ab­solute­ly. Not on­ly does the en­er­gy ef­fi­cien­cy of mold tem­per­a­ture con­trol im­prove mea­sur­ably, but out­put al­so in­creas­es be­cause sig­nif­i­cant­ly short­er cy­cle times can be achieved com­pared to clas­sic var­io­ther­mal tem­per­a­ture con­trol. For ex­am­ple, there is no longer an in­jec­tion de­lay un­til the tar­get tem­per­a­ture is reached at the cav­i­ty wall.